


The Dust Beacon

by HisDarkMaterialsFan



Series: The Origin of Dust [1]
Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: Bermuda Triangle, Different Points of View, F/M, Hunted, Inter-world travel, Lyra-Will Reunion, Storm vs Ship, bit taken from book of dust 1 and 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2020-06-21
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:42:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 40,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24003022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HisDarkMaterialsFan/pseuds/HisDarkMaterialsFan
Summary: Will pondered over what he had learned that day. If it had been right about the Russian who claimed to know his father, surely he could get to Lyra?
Relationships: Kirjava/Pantalaimon, Lyra Belacqua & Serafina Pekkala, Lyra Belacqua/Will Parry, Lyra Belaqua/Pantalaimon, Malcolm Polstead/Alice Lonsdale, Malcolm Polstead/Lyra Belaqua, Mary Malone & Will Parry, Will Parry/Elaine Parry, Will Parry/Valdese Gramovski
Series: The Origin of Dust [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1731001
Comments: 6
Kudos: 21





	1. Home

**Author's Note:**

> Starts off quite slowly. Quite a bit of just filling you in on what has happened since the end of TAS. Features Will at school and Mary meeting up again with her old friend and colleague. Quite a short chapter, and it contradicts Book of Dust volume two.

It had been three years since Lyra had left Will on the bench in the botanical garden of his Oxford. Nothing much had changed for Will, who still went to school and looked after his mother (once he had heavily thanked Mrs Cooper, who had looked after her while Will was away on his journeys with Lyra). But he couldn't get Lyra off his mind.

Before he had made the heart-wrenching decision to close the doorway and break the knife, he and Lyra had agreed that they would both try their best not to think about one another that much, but it was proving to be extremely hard.

All he could think about was her sweet aroma, her smile which would lighten up his mood no matter how angry or sad he was and the scent of her hair… but every time he did, he felt a shudder of regret and anger at himself; he was starting to hate himself, and it was beginning to affect Kirjava as well.

As for his daemon, she stayed at Mary’s house and something which they had noticed was that when they were separated they could do two different tasks at the same time, which was very useful. Will lived at Mary’s house because his mother had been put in hospital; while Mrs Cooper had been looking after her, she had had a mental breakdown, and it turned out that her conditions were much worse than they had thought, but fortunately Mary had stepped in before they could put him in a home for children who had legal trouble, like Will had after killing the man who had broke into his old house to steal his dad’s letters to his mother. He couldn’t take Kirjava to school; she had settled after that priceless moment with Lyra when they had touched each other’s daemons, making sure that they were settled for good. He- and Kirjava- would be in perilous trouble if she was exposed to anyone but Mary.

So on another one of the unchanging days of his life, he found himself in his science class slumped on the back of his chair. He felt like all the energy had been drained from him and he couldn’t be bothered to listen as the teacher rambled on meaninglessly about how a mosquito attacked the human body. Will made one connection, though, as he so often did during his science classes. The mosquito drained the blood from someone’s body, like a Spectre drained the life out of somebody’s daemon. Maybe spectres took different forms in his world? And that got him thinking about his journey with Lyra, and consequently just Lyra. He remembered fondly that moment in the world of the mulefu when she had gently lifted the red fruit to his mouth, and the sweet taste of her mouth. It had been blissful. He didn't just remember it, he re-enacted it, his hands touching the back of her head and stroking her hair. 

‘Are you in the middle of something here?’ It was Mr Dawnley, his science teacher.

The rest of the class sniggered and Will realised that he was still in science class, and that he would never see Lyra again, and that like many times before since his parting with Lyra, he had to try to not think about her, and get on with his life; that was what she was undoubtedly doing. He felt a nudge in the back from Daniel Green, the seemingly leader of the class and the one who would always pick on Will after school and do whatever he could to raise anger from him. Most of the time, Will would not touch Daniel and walk away pretending not to notice, but sometimes Will couldn't keep his cool and Daniel would end up with a bleeding mouth and a broken nose.

Will got his head down and started working but was constantly being interrupted by nudges in the neck from Daniel. Eventually, he turned around.

‘Must be following in your mother’s footsteps, you’re going more mental than she ever was! And that’s saying something!’ Will had been expecting nothing less. He turned his head to a chorus of snorts of laughter from the people around him, and without lifting his head up, he knew that Mr Dawnley was shooting daggers from his eyes to Daniel, because of the eerie silence which had suddenly invaded the room. He knew that he was going to get hell from him after school, but for now he was safe from Daniel. 

* * *

While Will was at school, Dr Mary Malone was with her daemon, who was only visible to her and half-visible to Will, out looking for someone who had agreed with her to meet there and the time. Mary was two minutes late. She was being held up by the bustling, loud traffic of the Oxford main road. Finally, after many, many minutes stuck helplessly in the driving seat in a standstill, she found that she could go through the traffic lights and turn the right into the reasonably quiet road which held her old laboratory. She no longer had a job there, but she presumed that that was what this meeting was about. And surely enough, standing there underneath the shade of the building, was her old friend and colleague, Oliver Payne. He was a lot younger than her and he was dressed smartly as if he was going to a job interview. Mary was quite sure that it was the other way round and that she would be the one being interviewed for a job. She was half right. When she pulled up and parked the car next to Oliver, he did not smile or show any sign of happiness or exclamation under the black, unfathomable sunglasses. Consequently, she decided not to smile either. But what he said was nothing like what she had expected.

'Who is the girl Lyra Belaqua?’ he asked, taking Mary by surprise, and that was evident to Oliver. So she did know her, that was a start, he thought to himself, still showing no emotion whatsoever.

Mary knew she messed up when her eyes had widened once Oliver had mentioned Lyra. This was far from the Oliver whom she had known, while she had been in the world of the mulefu he must’ve changed a lot. Well, so have I, she thought. She recalled her memories of when she had first met Lyra, and found none which involved her former colleague. How did they know each other? Or more likely, how did he know her?

Despite the fact that Dr Payne could see that Dr Malone clearly knew about the girl, she still tried to lie. 

‘I don’t know who she is. I’m sorry, I just don’t recognise the name. Anyway , I thought that this was something like a job interview, not an interrogation.’ She said calmly.

Payne let out a small laugh, showing his first signs of humanity in him since the conversation began. Mary sighed, relieved that her old friend hadn’t turned into a completely different person, and that the world hadn’t turned on its head since she returned from her journeys into the world of the mulefu. 

‘Oh, Mary. You’ve changed so much since the last time I saw you. And how the positions have changed!’ She knew what he meant. The last time they had had a conversation, they had been offered further funding for their research group by someone called Charles Lactrom. She had been in control of the group and he was about to accept a job offer in Geneva. 

‘How is the research group? And do you have any more funding?’ She asked, because she knew about Charles Lactrom’s death, and wondered how they were coping, because Payne had accepted his offer of funding.

‘Actually, I was meaning to talk to you about that. That was why I asked for you to come here now, in fact.’ That had wiped the smile off his face completely, and Mary knew what Payne was about to say. 

‘We’ve shut down. We found that the funding which that Lactrom guy promised us was real, and we carried on our research as normal, but the Cave was destroyed. Know anything about that?’ He raised an eyebrow. 

Mary blushed; after consulting the Cave for the first time with words, they had told her to destroy it, and she had done just that.

‘Anyway, we attempted to re-build it but about two weeks after we started to rebuild it, the funding ceased without warning completely.’

Now this was getting really worrying for Mary. How did Oliver Payne know about all the inter-world things which had happened to her? Or was he just assuming things and making it look like he knew everything and therefore he would always be in control of the conversation? 

‘I’m sorry to hear that. Do you know how?’ Mary still played the good cop, but Oliver somehow knew that Mary had something to do with all of this; it just seemed too suspicious. He was about to say something, but Mary’s daemon, Zakariya, spoke to her first.

‘He knows something but he’s desperate that we don’t know it and that we give him some information about where we went and what happened with the funding.’ Oliver couldn’t hear what Zakariya was saying; no one in her world who she knew of could except Will. They had developed a trick which people in Lyra’s world had been doing for as long as people could remember. While Mary talked to the person, Zakariya- who wasn’t visible to them- would watch their daemon inside them, and would infer if they were lying or if they wanted something by their nervous movements. Payne’s daemon was a ginger cat with millions of shades of ginger on her fur. 

Mary didn’t respond to her daemon because Oliver could hear that and it would sound like she was talking to him. Instead, she nodded subtly and talked to Payne.

‘You see, Mary, you were missing for some months after I accepted the funding. But I knew you hadn’t gone out of the country, because it was a few days away from the day where we would negotiate with the company for the original funding, but you were never at your house. So where were you?’ 

Mary didn’t know how to respond to this. It was true, she would never have gone out of the country, or even out of Oxford, because of the negotiation. And it was also true that she had gone off the face of her planet. But she couldn’t tell Oliver any of this. The conversation wasn’t going at all like she had thought.

She decided that two could play at his game.

‘And weren’t you going to Geneva for that job? Why aren’t you there now?’ She asked venomously, her voice tainted with disgust. And from his reaction, she knew that she had hit him hard with that. He flinched and his frown turned even more into a scowl.

‘Do you know why I’m not there now? Because I thought that we were in for a big opportunity here in the research group! I thought that we could carry on with the research which we were so close to reaching and we could finish what we started. But no, you had to disappear all of a sudden and destroy the Cave with you, and I had already declined the job offer in Geneva, but you betrayed my trust!’ He was shouting now. Zakariya could see his daemon inside him baring her teeth. Suddenly, Mary was scared of this man who stood before her. If she had thought that she had sounded angry when she had spoken, this was another level. She couldn’t reply to him now. She couldn’t speak to him now. She just walked away to her parked car and opened the door, before casting one last look at the man whom she had once known and considered as her friend. 

He gave her a disgusted look as if to say get out of my sight. At that, she turned away from him and drove off into the bustling streets of her Oxford.


	2. The tartars

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Major character addition. First action sequence and first check up on Lyra in St Sophia's.

Lyra had settled into her new college quite well. She found all the lectures reasonably interesting, her own study room was comfortable, even though it would take some getting used to from her one at Jordan and she and Pan were as content as ever. Except for Will.

She knew that if she had that decision again, of staying in her world or going with Will, she’d stay with him even until she would inevitably die of the illness which would slowly and painfully make her waste away. And she would give anything to have that chance again, but she couldn’t. It was impossible. Despite this, even if there was the slightest chance that she could see him, hear him, touch him again, then she would snatch it up in a heartbeat. But there wasn’t and there never was going to be. So she shouldn’t cling hopelessly onto a memory. Because from now on, that was all he could be to her. A memory. It was the most unsatisfactory thing. But she had a life to live, and a Republic of Heaven to build. That was why she and Will had parted in the first place.

So as she found herself walking back to her study room she noticed that she was being followed. At first it was just irritating. She was turning through the maze of corridors- some narrow and some large- when Pan felt the presence of the same sparrow daemon who had been sitting behind them in the lecture, and who had been following them ever since it had ended. When they had first left, Lyra and Pan hadn’t noticed; they couldn’t even see their followers in the busy corridors of familiar and unfamiliar faces who were hurrying to lectures or back to their study rooms. But now after several unusual turns into quieter areas of the college, it was evident. Lyra knew all the other girls who lived in one of the neighbouring study rooms, and this girl wasn’t one of them. With Pan watching subtly behind them, Lyra crossed the courtyard and picked up her pace. Her walk turned into a stride, but the girl behind her matched it. At least she thought that it was a girl. But she knew that she would have to get inside quickly before she faced the person behind her. Finally, to Lyra and Pan’s relief, they made it across the courtyard to the door of their study room. Once Lyra was sure that it was just them and their daemons in the corridor, she stopped and turned around. And so did her pursuer. The sparrow daemon came to an abrupt halt in his flight and for the first time, Lyra saw her face.

* * *

In Lyra’s world, about four thousand miles away from where she was currently being pursued, sitting at his kitchen table in the room he was renting out in Novorossisk, was a Russian man called Valdese Gramovski. He was a middle-aged man with dark features and an intelligent face. His daemon, stretching by the fire, was a large, ruthless jaguar. But they were both on their guard. The man’s eyes were restlessly darting between the half-open window and the wooden door, held closed only by flimsy hinges and an ancient lock; it could be broken open easily. Their original plan had been to go out into the busy streets of the port, and from there they would try and catch a boat across to Brytain, where they could hand themselves over to the Magisterium before they were captured by the tartars- not that they had done anything wrong. But news spread quickly, and after it had been discovered that the veil between worlds in the very North, just below the Aurora, was thinner than anywhere else in the world, he had been hunted down mercilessly by the tartars without cease. The veil was even thinner after Lord Asriel opened the window and it was eventually closed. But there was a reason that it was him being chased down. It was about his past. About the experiment that his group had conducted in the North. But not this North. His North. And he was beginning to feel the effects of being in a different world to his home extremely badly. Everyday he knew that he was getting closer to his last, but he didn’t know when his last would come. 

Then he heard several loud, heavy footsteps clatter up the stairs below him. He was instantly on alert. Their old plan wouldn’t have worked because he realised that there were tartars everywhere in the streets, and they were searching every single boat which entered and left the port of Novorossisk. So instead him and his daemon were resorting to combat. As he crossed his small room to the safe where he kept his papers and reached to the very back, he heard a fist slam down onto the door. He felt for the familiar cold, metallic gun which was at the very back of the safe. He heard shouting on the landing as he reluctantly pulled out the gun, but he knew he would have to fight his way out of this- he couldn’t let the tartars claim the power which he held inside him because he had no idea what they would do with it. But he didn’t care about the people he killed as long as there was a reason, whether it be money or orders, he would do it as long as it wasn’t pointless, and he was good at it too. More fists pounded down onto the door, which was very clearly on its last legs. His daemon put her weight back on her hind legs, ready to pounce.

‘Evin, be ready. There might be more coming in from the window.’ He told his daemon, who was now hiding behind the desk which the inn had provided for their work. Valdese crouched in the shadow of the bed, his gun raised slightly. And then the hinges fell off in one almighty snap and the tartars burst inside.

Evin pounced ferociously at the tartars’ arctic dog daemons, who had not been anticipating the attack. Her claws entangled with their skin as the rug which was on the floor was soaked with blood- human, dog and jaguar. Valdese, however, waited as the tartars creeped around the room, looking in every nook and cranny. They knew that he had been expecting them; they had been chasing him ever since he had gone to the North to find the spot where Lord Asriel had opened the window, all that time before. They had heard rumors about him, and as soon as a rumor entered the tartar stronghold, it would travel throughout in a matter of hours, and as soon as Valdese knew that they were hunting him down, he and Evin decided to race down the globe into Europe where the tartars were not welcome. The hiding spot which Valdese had chosen was right at the back of the room, unlike Evin, and as his daemon attacked those of the tartar soldiers, he waited patiently, but the pain which he was getting because of his daemon’s fight with the arctic dogs was unbearable so he decided to get out of his hiding spot before they found him. From their heavy footsteps on the creaking floorboards, he knew most of their locations and although he only had eight shots loaded in his pistol, there were seven of them and he only needed one shot for each of them. He stood up confidently, and with the element of surprise, he hit the closest one to him in the chest, as he fell to the ground, coughing out blood. One of their daemons left its fight with Evin and pounced recklessly onto him, but before Valdese could break the taboo and touch the daemon, he rose up into a cloud of Dust as his skull was hit by a bullet. But that meant Valdese had six bullets for six men. He ducked once more behind the bed and slid to one side, firing the pistol at one’s neck while Evin ripped the head off one, killing the human and daemon instantly. Evin wasn’t suited well to the unforgiving weather of the North, and fortunately they didn’t spend much time there anyway. Despite Valdese being born in Russia, he had been living in Asia for the most part of his life, and that was probably why his daemon had settled as a jaguar, not a snow leopard. But nonetheless, they tried not to spend the least possible amount of time in the North for that reason alone. 

There were four men left, and as the tartar’s daemons got the better of Evin, pinning her to the ground between them, it was up to Valdese. But he felt the pain which his daemon was feeling as well, and winced as he felt himself being stuck to the floor by some invisible force. He managed to get up, though, just as one of the tartars got to his hiding spot, well it wasn’t much of a hiding spot anymore, and fired a shot up into his chin. Shots flew narrowly past him as he had to duck again, before shooting a bullet into a tartar’s stomach. Now there were only two left, and that was one when Evin killed another, relieved of her position of being pinned to the floor after two of the daemons floated up into a cloud of Dust. The final daemon rushed to its human as he fired several bullets at the bed which Valdese was hiding behind. But now he had a different target, because he realised that despite the fact that Valdese was in a spot where he couldn’t shoot him, his daemon was in the open, and instead the final tartar aimed his rifle at him. The pain sent a wave of adrenaline coursing through his veins, but upon seeing the tartar aiming the gun at her, Evin had bounded towards her human, and was only hit in the leg. The tartar and his daemon nervously advanced, his rifle raised. A few more shots were fired and they heard the anbaric lamp crash to the floor. Valdese managed to painfully drag himself out of his hiding spot with his pistol raised, aimed and ready to fire. The tartar got one last glimpse at the man who he was meant to capture before a bullet pierced the skin around his neck.

  
  



	3. The old Acquaintance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Malcolm Polstead receives a letter and a visitor, while he learns more and more about Lyra

Malcolm Polstead and his daemon Asta were sitting in their study room in Durham college when the letter came. First it was a quiet knock on the door which was just loud enough for Asta to hear. Malcolm was pretty sure that he knew what it was, and wasn’t surprised to see the porter standing in the corridor, dimly lit by anbaric lights which hung from the ancient ceiling. The porter was holding in his hand, as Malcolm had expected, a small rectangular envelope with neat writing on the front, and even in the bad lighting he could see that it was addressed to him.

He thanked the porter before taking the envelope in his hand, but the porter was putting up a fight. He held onto the envelope with a strange urge. 

‘What is all of this about, Malcolm? Now you’ve had several letters with exactly the same writing at the front, and I saw Alice at Jordan the other day with exactly the same letter and exactly the same writing! I know there is something suspicious going on. Don’t take me like an idiot, Malcolm. I promise that I en’t gonna tell anyone. Otherwise I’ll tell the Master!’ he threatened, still pulling onto the letter.

‘It’s nothing, Grayham. Don’t worry about it.’ Malcolm tried to calm him down, but he wouldn't, and even his dog daemon was rearing up on her hind legs, ready for a fight. Malcolm knew that he couldn’t tell him the truth without their permission, but he couldn’t not say anything- so he would have to lie, but if it was a bad one, the porter would report him to the new Master, who was a known representative of the Magisterium.

‘Don’t lie to me, Malcolm. Just ‘cause I’m the porter, and you’re a scholar, doesn’t mean that I’m stupid and you’re really clever. I know what you and Alice are doing is heretical, so either tell me or tell the bloody Church!’

‘So love is heretical now, is it? What has the world come to?’ he murmured. He had been put on the spot, but something the porter had said had given him an idea for a lie, and he saw from the fact that the porter was taken aback that it had worked.

‘What… but Alice got the same letter… oh, no. You don’t mean…’ it finally struck the porter, and he looked like he was going to faint, much to Malcolm’s amusement, although he didn’t show it.

Asta and the porter’s daemon were having a quiet conversation by their legs. Fortunately for Malcolm, the porter looked too shocked with all the colour drained from his face to put up any more of a fight, and he handed the letter over to Malcolm helplessly. After stumbling a few times, the porter reached the door and shut it behind him, and after Asta swiftly checked whether they were eavesdropping on them, which they weren’t, Malcolm put the letter down on his desk and turned to Asta. 

‘What did you say to his daemon?’ Malcolm asked.

‘I told him not to tell Alice about what we told him.’

‘I’m pretty proud of that lie, to be honest. I thought it was quite good under the circumstances.’

‘Alice is going to kill us though,’ Asta pointed out.

‘I thought you told them not to tell her?’ 

‘Do you really believe that?’

Malcom gave an amused smile to his daemon.

‘Never.’

Malcolm knew who had sent him this letter, and was almost sure he knew what it contained. He ran his hand across the length of it before cautiously lifting up the seal and opening the letter. As usual, it was in code, but it was easy enough to translate for anyone who was a member of Oakley Street.

_Malcolm Polstead,_

_As you should by now know, tomorrow at six o’ clock we will be holding another Oakley Street meeting, and it will be held in Dame Hannah’s house. Not everyone will be there at the meeting, since George Green is unable to join us and Bud Schlesinger is still in the North gathering research for the next meeting he is able to attend. Tomorrow we also need to discuss what we all have discovered about the further prophecy about Lyra Silvertongue and the upcoming events for both Oakley Street and the Magisterium. As always, do not share this or any Oakley Street information with anyone outside of Oakley Street._

_Candace Jones._

‘Well, what we did with the porter was right then. And as you guessed, the meeting is tomorrow, but unfortunately we don't have any more information to share with them, so how do we get out of that hole?’ Malcolm asked.

‘Well, we had a lecture which we had to teach, didn’t we?’

‘Asta, that was one hour of one day, plus preparation which barely took five hours. They won’t take that as an excuse.’

‘Well, what have we been doing then?’ Asta retorted, and she knew already that she had won this argument, although they never really had any arguments, and she would class this as more of a mere conversation.

At this, Malcolm gave in.

‘Fine, I know that you’re right, and because it’s either that or tell Oakley Street that I’ve been researching Lyra not for confidential purposes but for sexual purposes, and I’d never do the latter, so you win.’

Asta jumped elegantly up to his desk, careful not to mess up any of the work papers he had laid out on the desk. Malcolm knew what she was doing; she was going outside to go to Hannah’s house, where maybe she would have some information which they could use instead- Malcolm and Asta were sure that she would understand their current circumstances, and Asta and Malcolm could separate from each other. 

But just as Malcolm pushed open the glass window to let her out, Asta heard a noise outside. It sounded like it was about three hundred metres away. She twisted her neck to check if her human had heard it, and despite his lack of hearing compared to hers, he had heard it too. 

Asta jumped back from the cold of the night to the warmth of the study room as Malcolm shut the window. He instinctively reached under his bed for the gun which all Oakley Street agents were equipped with. Despite that, Malcolm seldom used his, in fact he wasn’t sure he had ever used the gun which Oakley Street had provided him with., but knew where it was when they needed it. 

With Asta still surveying the dark stretch of grass outside, Malcolm pulled out the gun and joined his daemon. 

‘Nothing.’ she told him, but shortly after she said that, there was another noise, this time louder and closer than before. Also, the source of the sound could be scarcely identified. In the faint light of the moon, it looked like a black speck in the horizon, and now that the shape was coming closer and evidently purposely going to their study room, Malcolm reluctantly loaded the pistol with six bullets. 

‘It’s about eighty metres away, hurry, Mal,’ Asta warned him. 

By this time, Malcolm was back at the window sill with the gun out in front of him, as he trained it on the _thing’s_ head. It was moving unusually fast, and then Asta, who as a cat could see quite well in the dark, at any rate better than humans, saw what it was.

‘Mal, stop!’ she shouted, just before Malcolm could shoot. ‘It’s a witch.’

At hearing this, Malcolm stopped abruptly, putting the gun down on the window sill. The witch was now barely five metres away, and even in the dark, he could identify his old acquaintance, who he had first met in his journey with Alice, and had visited him a few times since. 

‘Tilda!’ he shouted out to her. It was Tilda Vasara, the clan queen of the witches of Onega, with her cloud pine in her hand. Not far behind was her daemon, the arctic tern called Amos. Malcolm and Asta were both simultaneously relieved; they had thought that it might have been a night-gast, or worse. It might’ve even been a spy-fly, since it was common knowledge that the Magisterium had resorted to using them again, after they were made illegal. 

Tilda sat comfortably on the window sill, her face looking expressionlessly out into the bleak night sky, with very few stars giving out light. There was a faint breeze, which was the only thing you could hear in the eerie silence which surveyed the forest outside. Amos perched on the edge of Malcolm’s desk, his eyes nor face showing any sign of sadness or greeting either. 

‘Why have you come?’ Asta asked Tilda, who finally turned to face them.

‘I have recently come into contact with someone from your Oakley Street.’ she explained, ‘I was coming back from a witch clan meeting in Siberia, and he was looking for a witch, because he needed information about a prophecy, a further prophecy, in fact, about the girl. Lyra Silvertongue.’

‘Who was this man?’

‘He identified himself as Bud Schlesinger, and when I asked him why he wanted to know about him, he said that she was extremely important. Even after all she has done already. Then I remembered what you told me about the organisation called Oakley Street, and made the connection. When I asked, he looked taken aback, but admitted that he was an agent of theirs.’ Amos told them.

Tilda was the only person outside of Oakley Street who he had shared information about them with, and that was because he and Asta had agreed that they could trust her, and it would be useful for Oakley Street if there was another war to have a whole witch clan on their side. 

‘So what did you tell him?’ Malcolm asked.

‘About the further prophecy which involves Lyra once more.’

Although this was good news because it was something he could share it with Oakley Street, he didn’t like the fact that Lyra was involved because he didn’t want her to be in any danger; he felt a passionate love for her and he found it strange that he had developed most of those feelings for her when she was little more than six months old. Despite this, he always tried to hide his feelings for her and most of the time got on with whatever work he had to do. And then he had a thought. Through Oakley Street, he had learned about Lord Asriel’s rebellion and the war which was consequent, but he didn’t know about how he died, although it was rumoured that he had died at the same time as Mrs Coulter, Lyra’s mother.

‘It’s not finished, is it? That is what the prophecy is about, isn’t it?’ he asked, deliberately being vague. But Tilda seemed to understand what he meant.

‘No, it isn’t. And you’re right. That is what the prophecy is about. And you, Oakley Street, must resurrect the Rebellion. There are forces out there who are willing to help, like King Ogunwe’s armies will be a huge help to you, like they were to Lord Asriel, and the Magisterium don’t have much reign in the South of the Americas, predominantly in high Brasil, where you can find a lot of help. But as for Lyra, she must find her own help herself, and she will choose wisely, because if she doesn’t, then she won’t stand a chance against the Magisterium soldiers who will soon be hunting her down, with the intention to kill.’

This was a lot to take in for Malolm to take in, and he didn’t know how to respond. But the only clear part of his mind was in Asta, so she responded for him.

‘This war, when does it start?’

Tilda gave a knowing smile of warning.

‘You’ll know when it has started.’

And with that, her and Amos flew off into the dark, unfathomable night sky. 


	4. Josephine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lyra meets an old friend, Will faces old enemies and Mary comes to a horrifying conclusion

Lyra was relieved; it was a girl about her age, maybe a bit younger. She had blonde hair which flowed gently down her shoulders and blue, intelligent eyes. She was a tiny bit shorter than Lyra, and as they saw each other for the first time, the corners of the girl’s lips turned upwards into a smile. It was so genuine that Lyra couldn’t help but smile back, but there was something else. Like when she had seen Lord Boreal again in Will’s world in that museum, the face had a strange familiarity to it, and Lyra and Pan both thought that they had seen the girl before.

There was another question lingering in Lyra’s mind- why had the girl been following them? Maybe Lyra was right, and they did know each other from somewhere before. But where had they made friends with a girl roughly her age before? And then it struck Pan before Lyra realised. He didn’t know the girl’s name, but he remembered talking to her before, and where they had met before.

‘Bolvangar!’ he said in exclamation, and then Lyra’s eyes glinted in realisation. 

The girl had clearly known before, because she just nodded her head, and her sparrow daemon flew down to Pan, landing centimetres away from his head.

‘I saw you in the hall for breakfast today, and was originally going to introduce myself to you then, but I had a lecture, and sure enough, you were going to the same one! I purposely sat behind you, just to make sure that it was you, and when I was completely sure, the lecture ended and I followed you here. My name is Josephine, by the way.'

‘Did you really need to follow us? Pan and I were worried for a second!’ Lyra, Pan, the girl and her daemon all laughed, and for Lyra and Pan, it was the first time she had laughed properly in a long time. And it was also the first time she knew that she had made a friend. 

* * *

Will could normally find that calm sense of mind which he had with the subtle knife when he was confronted by the gang of people at his school, and it helped that for the most part, he didn’t like hurting people, but when his mother came into the equation, he just couldn’t hold himself back. He had felt melancholy when he and Mary had gone to Mrs Cooper’s house, only to find that his mother was in hospital, because his old piano teacher had had no choice when his mother had a mental breakdown. Will had feared the worst, that she had been attacked by a Spectre, but she was certainly getting better in hospital and Will visited her occasionally. But somehow the news of his mother being hospitalised had spread to the people in his class who confronted Will every day in the same place at the same time after school. 

‘Where’s your imaginary girlfriend?’ they mocked.

‘How’s your mother? I heard that she only had five days left before she’s gone!’

Most of the time, it was Daniel, who was the seemingly leader of the gang, and he was always the one who would deal the most damage to Will, and would consequently get the most damage dealt back to him. 

Today, though, Will was in a rush to get home, because he and Mary were visiting his mother, since the doctors had said that she only had a few more days in there at most, and Will was looking forward to seeing how his mother was progressing in hospital. But the group of boys and girls in front of him wouldn’t budge, and he couldn’t get home to see his mum. Clearly, they wanted something with Will.

‘Come on, Will. If you’re antisocial like that, then you’re gonna turn into your mother, and no one wants that, least of all you!’ Daniel had once been Will’s closest and only friend, but that time was long gone now. As soon as he had gone back to Will’s house when they were both eight years old, and Daniel had realised that Will’s mother had mental issues, their friendship had turned into a deep hatred for each other which was still true to that day, and from then onwards when he was eight, he had had to fend for himself. 

Once again, Will tried to move through the crowd of people. Once again, they didn’t let him past. But this time, a violent fist, Will knew it to be Daniel’s fist, slammed into his stomach, snatching all the breath from his lungs. Will kept standing and trying to make his way through the crowd, but was every time unsuccessful. However, he was successful at keeping a calm state of mind. One last time, he tried with all his strength, and finally they reluctantly let him though. Will broke into a stride, and then Daniel spoke.

‘If you’re gonna be like that, then we’ll all be looking forward to when you’re gonna be put in an orphanage!’

At this, Will turned round with his eyes and his blood raging. Even Kirjava, from her resting place in Mary’s house, could sense something was wrong. Will lifted his clenched fist and drove it recklessly into the face of Daniel Green, drawing blood from his nose. Daniel’s cronies on either side of him advanced onto Will, ready and prepared to fight. But Will kept slamming his fists into Daniel’s now blood-soaked face. It was like Will was no longer in his own body, but was merely a spectator with no way of stopping himself. But he felt Daniel’s blood flow down his knuckles and something crack under his fist. Finally, he took a step back and looked at the damage which he had done. 

It appeared that Daniel had a broken nose, a black eye and two smashed teeth.

Will was horrified at what he had done, and with the cronies approaching him rapidly, he turned and ran back to Mary’s house.

When he reached his destination, he was still scared of what he had done. Deep down, he knew that Danial deserved it, but he had never wanted himself to be the person who commited the crime. He felt like he did all those years ago when those men had come to his house and he had killed one of them, and the visions of him falling helplessly down the stairs still haunted him sometimes. 

Kirjava leapt up gracefully into Will’s arms, and although she was tempted to ask, ‘what did you do?’ she decided against it because her human looked stressed, worried and anxious all at the same time. 

‘Is Mary back yet?’ he asked, still shaken by his experiences a few minutes before.

‘No, she went out to meet with Oliver Payne, her old colleague, for a job interview.’

‘Good on her. At least someone is managing to get used to normal life again.’ Ever since they came back from the world of the mulefu, the Will Parry who had lost his father, who had looked after his mother, who had killed a man while defending his home, was lost, and he was sure that that version of himself would never resurface.

‘You should stop blaming yourself for every bad thing which happens in the world. You’re just one person, and we both need to live our lives. We need to build the Republic of Heaven, but not like that.’

Will shot Kirjava a deadly glance which made her immediately regret what she just said.

‘But Will,’ she said pleadingly this time, ‘Pan… Pan and Lyra are feeling the same way.’

Will turned on her fiercely, almost as fiercely as he just had on Daniel Green. 

‘Don’t you dare mention either of their names!’ he shouted, but they both knew that it was more of a plea.

‘Will, you know I felt the same way about Pan as you felt with Lyra. We went through all of that together,’ she validly pointed out. But this seemed to anger Will even more.

‘Really? Well you weren’t there when Mary told us about the marzipan! Were you there when Lyra put the fruit to my mouth under the wheel-trees? Was it you who had to snap the bloody knife?’ he shouted passionately.

‘Will, you don’t understand-’ 

‘Of course I bloody understand! We’re the same person! So tell me, where were you when Lyra and I kissed under the wheel trees? Exactly, nowhere to be seen!’

‘Where were you when you left us on the shores of the world of the dead?’ she replied indignantly.

Now it was a battle of who could overspeak each other, but they seemed to be tied in a stalemate. Neither of them wanted to say anything, and the room was suddenly filled with an extremely awkward silence, and it was still in that state, with Will sitting grumpily in the armchair on one side of the room, and Kirjava lay silently on the mattress on the other, when Mary and her daemon, whom Kirjava had named Zakariya, entered the house.

She immediately sensed that something was wrong, but she had some important news to share. As Mary strided over to where Will was sitting, Zakariya flew down to perch just above Kirjava’s head.

‘Will, Oliver Payne, you know him right?’ she asked, before remembering that Will and Kirjava knew nothing about him, except that he was her old colleague. After giving him a quick brief about who he was, she told him the news she had to share with him.

‘He knows about Lyra.’

Whatever Will had been expecting, it wasn’t this.

‘What? How? They never met, did they?’

‘No, that’s what I’m confused about. But I think I know why. I think he’s part of the Magisterium.’

And if Will was already confused, this sent his mind into a whirlwind of thoughts, deceit and confusion. He felt his mind become overpowered and switch off. The last thing he remembered was a dizzy sensation and the floor gently swaying in a syncopated rhythm.


	5. The prophecy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Magisterium try to find answers about Lyra and Valdese Gramovski as the CCD continue to rise in power.

Father Montgomery had two acquaintances sitting on the table with him: his assistant, Father Jian, and Fra Pavel, the alethiometer reader for their department of the Church.

Father Montgomery was a short man yet with a broad back, and with little, or rather, no hair on his particularly round head. He wore solemn, black clothes as if he was mourning somebody, so much so that at night he blended in really quite well, even with his white head. His assistant, a lot more bulky and taller, sat next to him, rather uncomfortably in the small chair which he consumed.

Opposite them, Fra Pavel sat nervously, and it was showing because he and his frog daemon were trembling. Father Montgomery could see this, and thought that it was mostly caused by the intimidating stare which his eagle daemon was giving her. ‘So, Fra Pavel. We have called you here now because we want to frame a question to the alethiometer, and we understand that you are a quick and thorough reader of the instrument.’ This was not strictly true, in fact both Father Montgomery and Father Jian knew and had been informed several times that although he _was_ a thorough reader, he was probably the slowest one in the whole of the Magisterium, but Montgomery wanted Fra Pavel to feel like they were confident in him.

‘Well, my speed depends on the question and the answer which the alethiometer gives, because it can be small and clear, or long and complicated. So what question do you want to ask it?’ he asked, still nervous. His frog daemon jumped down under the chair to hide from the intimidating glare of Montgomery’s daemon.

This time it was Father Jian who spoke.

‘It’s quite a simple question, but an undeniably important one nonetheless. What is the prophecy about Lyra Belaqua?’ 

It was a familiar name to Fra Pavel; he had been asked many questions on that girl before, and most of the time the alethiometer gave long, winding answers. But he already knew the answer to this. However, as he opened his mouth to tell them that they already knew the answer to this, Father Jian butted in.

‘May I rephrase that question, Fra Pavel. May we ask what is the further prophecy about the girl Lyra Belaqua?’ 

Fra Pavel had no idea that there was a further prophecy about the girl, and was beginning to calculate in his head what symbols he should use to make it clear that he wanted knowledge about the further prophecy, not the original one, when Father Montgomery excused him from the room, and he left maybe a bit too eagerly to get away from the eagle’s glare and to his symbol books.

As Fra Pavel left, Father Jian made sure to shut the door before sitting down to face Father Montgomery, who looked like he was making some calculations and measurements in his head, while looking at a piece of paper which had news for him on it.

‘Did you see the newspaper a week ago?’ he asked the man sitting opposite him.

‘Was it the one about that Russian man with the jaguar daemon who went to the place where Asriel opened the window between worlds?’ Jian asked, but knowing that he was correct.

‘Do you know what world he was from?’

‘Isn’t he from Russia in this world? All the windows are closed. We asked the alethiometer about that three years ago.’ 

‘No, he is from a different world. Some of the other departments of the Magisterium are already looking into this, and from one of our spies in the Consistorial Court of the Holy Spirit we know that there is someone in our world who has been to his world, in fact.’

Father Jian looked wide-eyed at him. Then with a moment of clarity, it dawned on him.

‘Lyra Belaqua.’ 

Father Jian’s daemon, a rather large and strong-looking dog, got up from lying down and the eagle followed suit, gliding effortlessly down from her perch to under the table, and the two daemons started talking rapidly to each other, so fast that the humans sitting a metre from them couldn’t make out a word which they were saying.

Father Jian thought about what he had just said, and what that meant, because they had already known about the original prophecy about her.

‘So that can mean two things. Either, the man is from the world known as Cittagazze, or he’s from the world which the boy with the knife came from.’

Montgomery already knew this, but as he was told this by his assistant, a question formed in his mind. He had once travelled between worlds as a member of the Magisterium, and he had once been affected by the sickness which was caused by staying in another world for too long.

‘How has he not been affected by the sickness?’ he asked, but soon realised that his assistant had no idea that there was a sickness and didn’t know how it was caused. 

‘When you stay in someone else’s world for too long, your body doesn’t react well to the different air and you have an extremely bad sickness which affects all of your body and after about ten years, you will die from it,’ he explained.

‘But when did he come over into our world?’ Jian asked, still not fully understanding all of what he was being told.

‘He came over about sixteen years ago.’

This triggered something at the back of Jian’s mind, for he used to be the assistant of Lord Boreal for a very brief time, but he remembered something from then.

‘Grumman, he came over about the same time. About sixteen years ago.’

The daemons continued their rapid conversation, which to any human would have sounded like gibberish.

‘What? But Grumman wasn’t from a different world, he was from this one.’

‘No, when I was working with Lord Boreal we discovered that he was from the same world which the boy with the knife came from. In fact, he was his father.’

‘What?’ stammered Father Montgomery. He had thought that their conversation would have been him explaining things to his assistant, but it was apparently swerving a completely different direction.

‘So, he must’ve come over with Grumman. But what does that mean?’

The daemons finished their conversation, and while the eagle flew up elegantly to her perch again, the dog walked lazily back to its resting place.

‘For us, it must mean that we have to get hold of him and use him for our purposes, otherwise he is a threat. Especially after creating a window between worlds without the subtle knife or a guillotine. Only himself and his and daemon.’

'But how did he do it?' Jian asked.

'Only he knows. And I agree with you, it does deem itself impossible to achieve that feat, but it is also impossible to survive in a different world to his own for sixteen years. So we need to get him and bring him here to interrogate him and experiment on him. Are there any zeppelins or boats which we can use to track him down and capture him?' 

'I'm afraid that we can't bring him here to Geneva; we have no available zeppelins or boats here, and if it is known by other departments of the Magisterium that we have him held captive, we will be the centre of attention, and that is the last thing we want. But I do know a place which should be perfect to hold him captive.'

Montgomery arched an eyebrow. 'Where are you suggesting?'

'It used to be used by the General Oblation Board, and goes by the name The Station. The Magisterium had it re-built a few year ago. It's more commonly known as Bolvangar.'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Both of the members of the Magisterium whom I have mentioned here do not feature in His Dark Materials, and in the three year time skip since the end of TAS, the CCD have been re-established by Father Montgomery. It was also a shorter chapter this time, but not that I'm making them shorter as I go along.


	6. The meeting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lyra. The word played around in his head; ricocheting off the walls of his mind. He cradled the two short syllables which had formed and destroyed part of his life.

Malcolm Polstead, Alice Lonsdale, Dame Hannah Relf, Candace Jones and the old Master of Jordan College were all sat down, discussing terms that were known to the organisation known by its agents as Oakley Street. When it was created just before the Great Flood, it had plenty of young agents but now the only three able to fight a war were Malcolm Polstead, Alice Lonsdale and Candace Jones. 

Their old leader had died three years ago during Lord Asriel’s great war, and not all of their agents were present; Bud Schlesinger was still in the North trying to find out more information from the witches and the Panserbjørne about Lyra Silvertongue and George Smith was undercover as a member of the Magisterium, in the CCD and was constantly getting useful information for Oakley Street, but because of all the security precautions the Church went through because they were aware of Oakley Street, George was practically running on a knife edge.

‘Has anyone outside of Oakley Street become aware of us in the recent weeks?’ Hannah Relf started the conversation.

Malcolm shifted awkwardly in his seat and Asta hid behind his chair because now everyone was staring at him, including Alice. Clearly, all of them knew about his encounter with the ever-suspicious porter. Hopefully, they didn’t know about his excuse.

‘Well, the porter was rather curious when he delivered the letter which had the details of this meeting, and refused to give me it until I gave him an explanation, and he threatened to tell the new Master.’ Malcolm explained. 

‘And?’ Alice prompted, and once again Malcolm shifted uncomfortably in his chair and Asta maintained her position of hiding behind the chair.

‘Well, Asta and I were put on the spot a bit, and he bought it.’ Malcolm, as Asta had predicted, was trying his best to get out of the inevitable situation of telling Alice and his other fellow agents of Oakley Street what he had told the porter.

‘But what did you tell him, just for future reference.’

It was Hannah who spoke this time, and Malcolm and Asta felt a bit more comfortable.

‘He had recognised the same writing on a letter Alice got, Candace’s writing,’ he gestured towards the leader of the organisation, ‘so I told him that Alice and I were…’ his voice trailed off and he didn’t even need to finish.

‘Oh you fuckin’ idiot.’ Alice spat out with nothing but disgust in her voice. Malcolm could see some smiles of amusement on some of the other agent’s faces, but he was trying to avoid the cold glare of Alice. Hannah could see the tension rising between the two youngest in the room and decided to try and change the subject.

‘Has anyone got any further with the prophecy about Lyra Silvertongue?’ she asked, and Alice’s attention was now focused on her, much to Hannah’s relief.

‘Well, I received a letter from George yesterday, telling me that the CCD are still rising in power in the ranks of the Magisterium, and that they have asked their alethiometrist to frame the question: what is the further prophecy about Lyra Belaqua? Also, they are looking into the Russian man who opened the window between worlds. I believe his name is Valdese Gramovski.’

Malcolm had heard of him, and was intrigued by him, since he couldn’t think of a way that a single human being could muster up that much energy required to make a window between worlds which followed the laws of physics. But somehow he had done it.

‘So are the Magisterium ahead of us? Or are we a step in front?’ Alice asked, recovered of her anger.

‘I could ask the alethiometer about the prophecy, and do we know how long it will take the Magisterium’s alethiometrist to figure it out?’ Hannah asked.

This was when Malcolm realised that he was ahead of everyone in this room _and_ in the Magisterium because of what Tilda Vasara had told him the day before, but he was scared, and so was Asta. they both felt a passionate, even reckless love towards the girl whom they were researching and he was afraid that if he told them what he had learned, or if they reached that far themselves, it would put Lyra in danger. So he kept quiet for now.

‘We could, because we already know that Fra Pavel is an extremely slow reader of the alethiometer, and Hannah is undoubtedly faster, even if we are behind them.’ The Master pointed out, but after the Church had him removed from his position, they mostly referred to him as Dr Carne.

‘Candace, do we know anything else from George?’

‘No. He is very limited in his actions with Oakley Street because he will die in horrible ways if he is found out. But has anyone found out anything more about the further prophecy concerning Lyra? Because if we have the answer while Fra Pavel is still consulting the alethiometer then we will have a big head start on the Church.’

Malcolm knew that he looked suspicious; he hadn’t contributed with anything all meeting and Asta was avoiding the glares of the other member’s daemons. He also knew that he would have to tell them what he had learned, and didn’t doubt Hannah’s ability with the alethiometer, and therefore knew that if he didn’t tell them, she would find it out anyway. He sat up nervously.

‘Yesterday a witch I know came to me to speak about the prophecy,’ he told them, ‘she told me what was going to happen for us, the Magisterium and Lyra.’

‘It’s all coming out now,’ Alice rolled her eyes, but Candace was suddenly interested.

‘What? Why didn’t you tell us before? How does it end?’ she was sitting on the edge of her seat staring intently into Malcolm’s eyes, and he had to look away because he thought he was going to faint under their strong glare. He shook his head.

‘No. She told me nothing about how it all ended, but I suppose the prophecy didn’t state that. I think it’s because it depends on the actions which we, Lyra and the Magisterium take. But we can’t assist her. She was adamant of that. But there is another thing. The war which Lord Asriel started hasn’t finished yet. It’s up to us to finish it, and we need to gather an army for it.’

The other members sat wide-eyed as he recalled the precise words of Tilda Vasara. Once he had finished, it took awhile for everyone to process what he had just told them. It was Candace who broke the silence.

‘So we have to go around the world to recruit an army to fight in an inter-world war which never finished when it was initiated three years ago, and all at the centre of it is a seventeen-year old girl all on her own who has already played a huge part in all of this, and an organisation which might as well be a retiring home.’ It was a valid point.

After having it put out in different words for him, Malcolm did have to admit that it did sound pretty stupid. Was that really the prophecy? Had Tilda and Amos been telling the truth? If not, why would they have been lying?

Candace was right; Oakley Street was lacking in their agents who could fight, but wasn’t that what Tilda was hinting at when she said that they needed an army? 

‘But Lyra won’t be on her own. Tilda was also adamant about that. She has to trust the people who help her, and she has to choose them herself. And frankly, I don’t think Lyra trusts anyone at this table.’ Malcolm was sure about that, but Alice looked indignant. Ben, her dog daemon growled at Asta, who had appeared again from behind the chair. Just as Malcolm was going to counter it, he felt, or rather saw the sensation which was the spangled ring- his personal aurora. He didn’t fret, it happened often enough nowadays, he just closed his mouth from speaking and looked at Asta- a look of knowledge and understanding between both of them. She stepped forward elegantly, and if Malcolm was required to say anything, while he was under the restraints of the spangled ring, Asta would do it for him.

‘If I understand correctly, this is another prophecy completely about the child,’ Dr Carne asked.

‘Kind of, but it is linked with the old one. But may I point out that she is no longer a child. She is now seventeen years of age and her daemon settled when she was fourteen.’ Asta told them.

‘I would say that we know a lot more than the Magisterium now, but we still don’t know what the prophecy about her is. What does she need to do to fulfil it? I propose Hannah asks the alethiometer about that, and also if what the witch told Malcolm is true. And remember, Bud Schlesinger will be attending our next meeting, and he has been in the North so he might be able to back up what Malcolm has told us. If all of it is true, we shall do what we need to do to assemble the army and…’her voice trailed off, ‘Malcolm, what did she say we needed to do with the army once we have built it?’

‘She didn’t tell us, but I presume we have to fight the Magisterium and their forces. Wasn’t that what Lord Asriel did?’

Alice shook her head again.

‘How do we know any of this can be true? How can we trust a witch, who as far as we know could be working for the bloody Magisterium!’

‘We can trust multiple witches and George Green, so that is why we are not acting on impulse.’ Candace assured her.

Malcolm respected and admired their new leader greatly, the way she was always in control and how she would make sure that no one argued with what she said- but in a subtle way, and how anyone who had ever even glanced at her knew that she could easily out-smart them. And especially everyone in Oakley Street knew that. Malcolm and Asta thought that that was the reason Hannah had chosen her as their leader.

* * *

Will had recovered from his faint well, but was still extremely confused. His questions which he asked Mary got no answer, and after a while he gave up because he realised that she didn’t actually know any of the answers to them. She was as in the dark as he was.

‘How do you know that he is part of the Magisterium? But where is his daemon, then?’ he asked.

‘I think he _was_ born in this world, but somehow, I still don’t know, but I think he has something to do with them. Remember Lyra told us that in her world they were based in the Geneva, well he was about to accept a job offer there and I only briefly asked him about what the job was, because I was annoyed that he was leaving the project, but when I did ask he told me it was researching something similar to what we were doing at the time, but they didn’t call it Shadows, they called it something beginning with D, I remember him say. I know it’s not got a lot of evidence to back it up, but when I touched upon that job offer in our conversation, Zakariya saw his daemon inside him get worried, and he also saw that she, or _they_ were hiding something.’

Will nodded. He had almost forgotten that Zakariya was actually there. He wasn’t fully corporeal to him yet, but when he tried, he could see him, with his majestic wings and his eagle-like eyes which never missed a detail.

‘So does he have the job in Geneva then?’ Will and Kirjava were finding it hard to follow what Mary was trying to tell them.

‘Then, just before I left for the world of the mulefu and he left for Geneva, Charles Lactrom, a member of the Magisterium, came and offered us funding.’

Will saw what she meant, but still thought that Mary was overcomplicating things somehow. She saw this in his expression.

‘I know it might just be a load of rubbish, but he knows something which we don’t. And there is something else. He desperately needs the Cave. he knows about Shadows, or Dust, and he needs to communicate with it, or speak to it.’

‘But didn’t you destroy it?’ Kirjava pointed out.

‘Yes, but I’m almost sure that eventually he will rebuild it, but I can do it better than him, because I made it in the first place, and he knows that.’ 

‘What are you proposing?’

‘We need to steal the remains of the Cave. Because if the Magisterium, or Oliver Payne, gets there before us, then it will be like having a much faster, more efficient alethiometer, like the one Lyra’s got.’

Lyra. The word played around in his head; ricocheting on the walls of his mind. He cradled the two short syllables which had formed and destroyed a part of his life, a part which he now kept out of his mind as often as he could. Then he realised what day it was tomorrow. Midsummer's day. Summer solstice. The one day he knew him and Lyra, Kirjava and Pan, were in the exact same place, so close together yet so far apart, thinking about each other. At least, that was what he hoped for.

Although he knew that he should have wanted her to have moved on in life, that she wouldn’t be traumatised by memories which would never be enough, he knew that every single part of his body ached for her to be in the same situation- to not have moved on and to always thinking about him. 

To Mary it must have looked like Will was about to faint again because she asked him if he was alright and looked ready to catch him, even though he was a lot heavier than her, in case he fell. He gave a small nod and sat down on the sofa, trying to take in what Mary had just told him, and trying to get the memories he so desperately clung onto out of his mind.

‘So, we need to break into your old laboratory to steal a piece of equipment which you smashed and completely destroyed, to keep it from the hands of a force outside of our world, and try to fix it and read it ourselves, to find out what exactly?’ he asked. He noticed that Kirjava, who could always see Zakariya, was chatting to the alpine chough in a fast, almost urgent way.

‘I never said that we were going to read it!’ Mary told him, her voice raised slightly, but it was hardly a shout. Will had lived with her three years now and knew that she would never shout, not at him anyway.

‘But you inferred it,’ Will retorted. They had very few arguments, but when they did have one, it normally ended quickly after one of them left the room to prevent any further arguing.

Will could see Mary’s lips parting to say something back, but she stopped herself and said something different to what she was going to say.

‘I’ve had a hard day, Will, and I know it sounds crazy, but I’m almost sure that it is what we are supposed to do. I even consulted the I ching and although the answer was quite complicated, it told me that we need to get the Cave before the Oliver Payne. Before the Magisterium.'

She left out the part which said otherwise there will be dire consequences, she and Will both knew that Will would need to accompany her if they were going to get the Cave. Will also knew that whatever Zakariya had told Kirjava would soon end up in his knowledge, and that he would need to get up early the next day.

They were both right, getting the Cave was important. Just much more important than either of them could have ever thought at that moment of time.


	7. An army of boats

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will and Lyra go back to the bench, while Valdese faces an ambush

The next day, after barely any sleep for Lyra nor Pan, who had both been tossing and turning in bed, reliving the perfect memories of the world of the mulefu, they woke up and called the servant in even earlier than usual (they were normally the earliest girl up anyway) and it didn’t even take them two minutes to finish their breakfast. 

Although Pan and Lyra knew that they should’ve been there at midday, they both also knew that Will and Kirjava would be there at the same time; as early as they were. And they were right, Will and Kirjava _had_ come earlier than they were supposed to.

As soon as Kirjava had remembered what day it was, she had unfurled herself and had woken up Will with a chorus of loud, incessant meows. On any other day, Will would’ve ignored his daemon and tried to get back to sleep, but it wasn’t any other day. It was Midsummer’s day. 

As he had scrambled out of bed, left a note for Mary saying he’d be back for lunch and put on the only decent outfit he had, he was suddenly, for one or two seconds, blinded by little glints of silver light which filled the room, mainly encircling him and Kirjava. He thought that it was his mind playing tricks on him, and when he blinked they were gone, but Kirjava had also seen the same thing. He ultimately decided that it was the one day in the year he could be reunited with Lyra again, so he shouldn’t worry about something like that.

Lyra and Will reached the bench in their different worlds within seconds of each other. Will had sat down first with a sigh as he remembered fondly all the things they had been through during the war, and then remembered passionately what they had been through in the world of the mulefu. Then he thought about what Lyra would be doing right now. What was she doing with the alethiometer? Had she regained her unique talent for using it? What did she look like now that she wasn’t a child?

Just as he started thinking about her again, the _things_ appeared once more. Now he definitely didn’t think that they were figments of his imagination. They were focused on him as well as Kirjava, he realised. They were like little grains of light, maybe what Will would’ve thought of the snags which the subtle knife found if they were visible.

In Lyra’s world, on the same bench, Lyra and Pantalaimon were having exactly the same sensation. But she found it familiar, and although her memory had failed her before, she remembered where her previous encounter with these tiny silver shimmers of light was. Way back at the start. Before the War. Before Will. Before Roger’s death. Before she was told who her real parents were. 

In the Retiring Room, when she had been spying on the Master for her father, or back then he was her uncle. His presentation, and what had shaped and molded her life in a very different way then she would have ever expected. What she had saved and had helped preserve. Dust. 

* * *

He had had to steal one of the small boats which he assumed was gyptian, which had been tied up in the harbour of Novorossisk, and even doing that had been a struggle with the tartars surveying every inch of the port.

He had thought that he had killed most of them when they came to his room in the inn, but he was soon given the impression that there were more of them. A lot more.

It was hard with such a distinctive daemon, especially as far North as this, and with all the rooftops holding at least one armed soldier. 

But something else was becoming apparent. His daemon, Evin, had noticed the growing number of wild dog daemons, and almost all tartar soldier daemons were arctic dogs or arctic hounds, but the new arrivals meant one clear thing for Valdese and Evin. The Magisterium were also taking an interest in him. It was bad news for them, but soon they had thought of the positives. Clearly, the huge numbers of tartars had attracted them, but they both wanted him, but needed him alive. If he could escape, then both sides would assume the other side caught him. 

But in their haste to escape, Evin had been spotted by one of the dog daemons, and the Magisterium now knew that he had escaped from Novorossisk, but it meant the tartars wouldn’t be hunting him anymore. They would think that the Magisterium had caught him, and they knew that even with their whole army, they wouldn’t stand a chance against the Magisterium.

So as Valdese, who had learned to sail when he was a child in his own world, sat on the deck as the gentle wind carried the boat forward slowly, Evin checked each side of the boat, looking towards the misty horizon to check if they were being followed. 

They needed to be inconspicuous; the arrival of the Magisterium in Novorossisk had made sure of that for Valdese and Evin, so he didn’t want to rush the small gyptian narrow boat, especially in the impenetrable mist. 

As he often did, he tried to replicate what he had done on the peaks of the Arctic mountains, with the Northern Lights above him, to open a window into a different world. But he had done it into his world. He was sure of that, and so had Evin been. But they hadn’t crossed over for simple reasons, even after spending his whole life in this world trying to get back to his own, it had dawned on him in the final moments that they couldn’t.

Evin yawned beside him and lay down beside him, uncomfortable as she always was in the North, her coat nowhere near thick enough for the harsh climate. 

‘We did the right thing.’ She assured him. She could sense when he was longing for his home world again.

‘I know, but it was hard to take another look at our home. Especially since we know that we will barely last a few years in this world.’

‘But soon we can go back. Soon.’

‘Why, then, couldn’t we have gone back then, if we are going to go back soon?’ he knew that his daemon was right, and he also knew the answer to his own question, but needed to be assured that every part of him was in agreement.

She licked her fur thoroughly, the blood of the tartars and their daemons were still staining her sleek coat, and answered her human.

‘Think about it. We don’t yet have a way to close a window which we can open, and if people find out about it, then we will have unleashed chaos onto both our world and this one. Also, without being able to close one, we know about Dust, so the window would start leaking it and that is the worst possible scenario.’ 

Valdese agreed with the truth in her words. And it was also true that they did know more about Dust than any other living thing in the multiverse. Ever since he had met John Parry, his life had become entwined with it.

He remembered meeting John Parry for the first time, in a pub in Finland, Parry had been on an expedition in the Arctic, and had recruited him after Valdese told him about his former career as a contract killer and his discoveries in science. Parry had told that he would be very useful to the expedition, and he had been right.

Sometimes Valdese wondered how many shots his former friend had drunk to recruit him, but would never forget what had followed after he met John Parry.

Valdese had always been a solitary person; ever since his parents had been killed in an accident in the far North when he was young, he had grown up on his own and took no pleasure in some of the ways he had had to make money. He took no pleasure in recounting the number of people whom he had killed, and thought he was redeeming himself by becoming a scientist when he had money to live off. So when John Parry had offered him that, he had been ever-grateful. 

What had followed had been life-changing for both Parry’s and Gramovski’s lives.

‘There is a boat to our south. It is quite hard to see in the mist, but the shape of it’s unmistakable, and it’s quite big. About five times our boat. I think it’s the Magisterium.’

Valdese was snapped back to the current circumstances by Evin’s warnings. 

‘Where?’

She pointed a paw facing south, and Valdese could only just make out the faint shape of a boat, but still even at that distance, Valdese could see two things. Firstly, it was a lot bigger than their small gyptian narrow boat, and secondly, it did belong to the Magisterium. 

‘Damn it, ’ was all he said, as he got up to man the sail again. Evin went to the starboard side, manning the tiller at the back while Valdese pulled down desperately on the cord, which felt like it was at breaking point.

‘How much fuel have we got left, ‘cause I don’t trust this sail one bit!’ Valdese shouted over the cry of the now harsh wind. His dark hair flowed backwards as he turned to face his daemon, who had gone down from the deck to check their fuel situation.

‘None, well, only enough to keep the heaters going for about two hours.’ She informed him as she came bounding back up from the cabin. It was not good news at all.

Hearing this, Valdese pulled even harder on the cord, his head narrowly missed colliding with the metal boom as he ducked. The boat swerved to the left so violently that it was nearly completely vertical, and it was extremely close to capsizing.

‘Where are we going now?’ Even Evin’s normal elegant and powerful voice was now desperate.

He heard his daemon’s voice but had no idea how to respond, so didn’t bother. But now they realised how bad a situation they were really in. Another boat was heading straight towards them, but this time from the North, as if it had been following Valdese and Evin had ever since they left Novorossisk.

‘There are other boats, Valdese, be careful.’

‘I would’ve thought that that is an unnecessary bloody command! But how many others can you see?’ he asked nervously as the blistering wind carried them into what looked like it would be the path of one of the Magisterium boats.

‘Maybe six, one at each point of the compass except North-east and North-west, so in short we’ve got nowhere to go. They’ll shoot us down like an irritant fly.’

And then came the first shot. Valdese and Evin had both been anticipating it, but it was still a shock when it pierced the wooden side of the boat. Many more followed, and it was at this point they realised that they were cornered, but the shots couldn't have been to kill, they needed him alive. But still, they didn’t want to be in the hands of the Magisterium, he knew what they were willing to do for power and rule over everyone.

With each shot, Valdese and Evin both knew that the boat was overloading with water. Eventually they would both have to submit.

‘Should we open a window?’ Valdese suggested.

‘No! Remember why we didn’t cross over last time! We both know what happened when it opened!’

Valdese agreed with his daemon, when they had previously opened the window a few weeks ago, just using themselves, it had taken an angel to close it, because when angels travelled between worlds, it was nearly always travelled with the aurora, and Valdese and Evin had been fortunate that one named Xaphania, who knew how to close windows between worlds, had sensed the opening and had closed it, but had also warned them never to leave one open again.

The mast was getting battered by the shower of bullets which was now coming from every direction, and finally he realised where they were aiming.

‘Evin, they don’t want to kill us, but if they sink us or destroy the ship, we’ll have no choice but to give ourselves in. They’re trying to knock down the mast. But only the ship which came from the North, the others are trying to sink the ship I think. I’m not sure how long it will…’ his voice trailed off as he heard an unhealthy creak come from the bottom of it, and then the snap of the wood. ‘Evin! Jump!’ 

But it was too late. They both felt the impact as the mast came crashing down, colliding with them as it crashed down onto the deck. 


	8. Shots fired

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lyra and Will are together again...in their different worlds, and Will faces a devastating challenge. Meanwhile, the Magisterium gain answers and Oakley Street confront Lyra.

While Lyra and Pan had long ago realised what it was which was surrounding them and their daemons in their separate worlds, Will and Kirjava still had no idea what it was. 

Despite this, they observed that with every thought about Lyra and Pan, the Dust grew more like a blinding light which was consuming them completely rather than being separate little grains of light. Kirjava made a mental note to tell Mary about it later. She bounded up elegantly next to Will, who’s tears were now glistening in the sunlight. This was the only day he let himself cry; being his solitary self, he never showed much emotion, and tried to show as little as possible. But today was an exception.

He buried his face in his daemons soft fur, which reminded him so much of Lyra’s hair. Part of the reason was to try and hold back his tears and muffle his cry, but the other reason was to give his eyes a rest from the silver glimmers of light.

He recalled all of his memories with Lyra, right from the moment when the hair had stood up on end when he realised that there was someone there, and a girl about his age leapt at him, scratching and punching him as hard as she could, with a daemon called Pantalaimon, who had dumbfounded Will at the time, until their parting in his Oxford, not far away from where he was sitting. He remembered them telling him about why they had come here, and that they were also from a different world…

He stopped abruptly and sat up, almost being blinded by the Dust which surrounded him.

‘Kirjava, do you remember when Lyra described Dust to us back in Cittagazze, wait, no. Of course you don’t. You weren’t there.’

‘No, I was there. I share all your memories with you, even when I wasn’t corporeal to you,’ she told him.

‘Oh. So you remember that, well I think this is Dust.’ He gestured towards the grains of light with one hand, while with the other he shielded his eyes from the blinding light. 

Kirjava seemed to share his clarity. Tears began to once more form in his eyes, but his frustration was building with every thought he had. This was the reason he had had to be separated from Lyra. He could never see her again because of what was right in front of him. 

Lyra and Pan were also thinking about all their memories with Will and Kirjava. They laughed at the time when they had been to the moving photogram place, which Will had called a cinema, and she had really wanted to applaud at the end, but Will had told her firmly, ‘You don’t clap!’.

They remembered fondly the taste of hamburgers and coke, and she recalled proudly when she had made Will that omelet for breakfast. With each memory, the tears flowed down her cheeks faster and faster. She didn’t care about the Dust which was seemingly consuming her and her daemon, she only cared about Will and Kirjava.

Kirjava heard the footsteps before her human did. At first they were like all the others; fast, in a hurry and in the distance, but they weren’t getting quieter, they were getting louder. She pressed her paw gently on Will’s knee and gestured towards where the footsteps were coming from. Then they were unmistakable. They were coming from the main road, so would be coming up behind Will and Kirjava. To avoid suspicion, Kirjava sprinted soundlessly to the nearest bush, and as Will moved off the bench, as far away from the footsteps as possible, the Dust disappeared. It was somewhat of a relief to Will, but his eyes didn’t for a second leave the little forest where they had come from. He was familiar with it because he and Kirjava walked through it often enough on their way to Mary’s after school. 

He knew that Kirjava’s eyes were darting from tree to tree, trying to locate the person who was approaching. Will began to think that it was just a passer-by, he guessed that other people used the little trail for a walk or even just to get home. Maybe they were just annoyed because whoever it was had interrupted his time with Lyra and Pan. 

Kirjava must’ve felt the same way because she cautiously came out of her hiding space and Will bent down to stroke her.

Then the shots were fired. 

Will counted three sharp cracks and then felt a sharp pain in his arm. He rushed into the bush with Kirjava, and listened out intently for any more footsteps. He felt the same searing pain as when he had lost two fingers in gaining the subtle knife, and coincidentally it was the same arm.

He felt warm blood trickle down onto his daemon’s fur, which now stood on end. He searched through his pocket for a tissue, and at last he found one and tried his best to clean the wound, but he could see where the bullet made contact with his flesh, and the wound was extremely deep.

‘We have to run,’ Kirjava whispered, as the footsteps approached once more. 

The shooter of the gun wasn’t trying to be quiet- there was no point now, the damage had been done. But clearly whoever it was wanted to kill him, not just injure. But although he knew that they had to get away from the botanical gardens, Will couldn’t bear it. He had one day in the whole year which he got to spend with Lyra, even if he couldn’t see or hear or touch her…

The Dust appeared again, and it was so bright and all-of-a-sudden that it made Will trip over inside the bush, and to his anger and pain, he fell onto a group of thistles and thorns which were growing at the bottom of the bush, and he felt one push even deeper into his wound. He didn’t even attempt to muffle his cry.

‘Fuck!’

Despite the thorough pain which was coursing through his veins and the sudden lack of blood which made him want to fall over and go to sleep on the bench, knowing that Lyra and Pan were there in their world, he got up and sprinted out of the bush, his non-injured arm shielding him from the thorns and the Dust which, to his relief, was now disappearing. But running away from the bench and from Lyra felt like it had in the World of the Dead when Kirjava had been pulled away from him.

His daemon bounded next to him as he ran off the main path onto the grassy terrain which had much more cover in the vast variety of trees which grew there. 

Pedestrians were beginning to notice the blood trailing from his arm and the man with the gun, and Will, with the manners which he had abided by his whole life, always tried to slow down and say, ‘Excuse me,’ before barging past them. 

But the pain was overwhelming and he had to stop from the dizziness which was caused from the lack of blood circulating in his body. For one heart-stopping moment he thought the man had Kirjava, but to his relief she was by his side in a few seconds. 

He looked around but the shooter was nowhere to be seen. It also didn’t help that Kirjava felt the same pain which Will, who was now clutching his arm, felt. 

‘Mary can sort us out,’ Kirjava said weakly.

Will didn’t want to argue- he didn’t have the energy to- but he knew that he couldn’t possibly go back to Mary’s in his current state. 

Now a throng of people were clustering around them, and Will realised that Kirjava couldn’t stay, because if she did, the people would think that she was just an ordinary pet cat, and Will would never risk her being touched. He wanted Lyra to be the only person to ever touch something as precious as his daemon, especially not a stranger.

He shared a knowing look with his daemon, who bounded tiredly away from the grass where he was sitting and into another one of the bushes where Will would come after her later.

Will looked around dizzily at the people who were gathered around him, looking sadly at his arm, his mutilated fingers and the blood dripping down his arm. He knew what they would think. They would think he was part of a gang or something, and that he had got what he had deserved.

But at least it kept the shooter away. He couldn’t get to Will when many people were surrounding him. They acted like a shield of protection, but the thoughts weren’t clear in Will’s head, and the lack of blood made him want to lay down and rest. 

But he couldn’t. What if the man came back and finished him off? Who was the man? Why was he there? How did he know that he would be there? Then, with a sudden lurch of his stomach, he thought about the possibility. 

Did he come from a different world? What if he was a member of the Magisterium? That would mean… either that he was stuck in Will’s world and was angry at him for closing all the windows between worlds. But it could also mean… 

Will shut his mind, which didn’t take a lot of effort because his mind still wasn’t working properly, because he couldn’t get his hopes up. He couldn’t stand it if he spent the rest of his life trying to find a way to Lyra only to find out that the angels had been true to their word, and then he wouldn’t have any stories to tell the harpies, and he wouldn’t even be able to see her in the world of the dead…

‘Will! Will!’ Mary’s voice could be easily distinguished from the others which were small and murmuring. 

He wasn’t sure what had happened after he passed out, just that the man hadn’t come back and that he couldn’t move properly with the lack of blood. It was even a pain to speak and turn his head round to where Mary’s voice. 

The grass felt surprisingly comfortable, and to his relief he found that Kirjava was coming towards him, and that she looked better than before, and that must have meant that he was better as well. But he had no idea how long he had passed out for. 

As soon as Mary reached Will the first thing she saw was the wound, still bleeding, but fortunately slower and less intensely as it had before he had passed out. She tried to get him to move, but it wasn’t his mind which declined, it was his body. 

His vision was becoming blurred and it was only when Mary told him that she needed to get an ambulance that his body decided to try and move. 

‘We’ve got to get you back home,’ she told him, and was going to ask what had happened, but closed her lips when she saw that Will wasn’t in the mood to talk. 

Kirjava slunked tiredly beside them as Zakariya flew elegantly above their heads. 

Will felt like his legs were going to give way again for the third time in a matter of days, but he knew that he had to get back to Mary’s house because he couldn’t go to hospital. He had no idea of who that man was, which world he came from and if he had companions who were also seeking out Will with intentions to kill? 

But all Will could do was hold his left arm and limply follow Mary through the botanical gardens. All he could do was watch as the people pitied him as they walked on the more common path for pedestrians. Even the trees seemed to be whispering their sorrow for him. 

The pain was still unbearable, and it was showing in Kirjava as well, which wasn’t good because people could start becoming suspicious at why a teenage boy had been shot and was going home with a middle-aged woman, presumably his mum, and a cat was following them around wherever they went acting like it had also been shot!

At least Zakariya wasn’t visible to anyone, because the sight of her perching on Mary’s shoulder would multiply the confusion of the current sight to any human being in their world. Also if it was the Magisterium who were after him, then he would be easily recognised because of his mutilated fingers, his daemon and the new wound in his arm. When they finally reached Mary’s house, Will and Kirjava didn’t even have enough energy to get to their bedroom, and threw themselves down on the sofa with the very last bit of life they had in them.

* * *

The throbbing pain in the back of Valdese’ head was incessant, and even when thinking about the millions of things on his mind, he couldn’t get it out of his head.

They had treated him well, especially as a prisoner, as Valdese and Evin both agreed they were. They were fed well, and had a warm bed where they slept, but they both knew that it wouldn’t last more than a few days before they did something to him, and the worst part for Valdese and Evin was that they had no idea what the Church was intending on doing, and the Church had no idea what the boundaries were, in fact, where they were concerned, there were none. 

So when a short man who looked stern and modestly intelligent and a larger, taller man entered their room, pulled out chairs for themselves and sat down on their own accord, neither Valdese nor Evin were surprised. 

They had also been aware of three cameras in the room, but he knew they only took photograms, and bad quality ones at that, despite the fact that he knew in his world the advancements such as film and perfectly clear photograms. He supposed they would also be recording everything he said as well. 

The two men introduced themselves and told Valdese and Evin, who was staring disrespectfully at the two men’s daemons, that they were going to ask them a few questions.

‘Why did you travel North five weeks ago, when your daemon is not suited to the harsh climates and you were clearly not prepared for the tartars?’ the smaller one asked.

Valdese knew that it was common fact inside the Magisterium what he had done, so didn’t need to check with Evin to make sure what he said next was correct.

‘I went there to find a window back to my own world, or rather to create a window, and as you know, I was successful.’

The two men shared a knowing look, as if they knew something Valdese and Evin didn’t, but the more they thought about it, the more it seemed likely that they really did know something which Valdese and Evin didn’t. 

‘Well why are you still here then? Why are you going to let yourself waste away to the illness which is caused by someone staying in a different world to their own too long when you could go back to your own right here right now?’ it seemed more like an offer than a question.

‘Because I don’t know how to close a window,’ he kept his answers true, and was only going to lie when necessary.

‘Then how is the one you opened in the North closed?’ the taller one was now watching Valdese intently, and his strong, commanding dog daemon was not taking her eyes off Evin, but everyone and everything in that room knew which one would win in a fight. 

‘An angel closed it for me,’ the tone he used was deadly serious, so that was why Father Jian and Father Montgomery knew that he wasn’t lying. 

Father Jian slammed his fist down into the desk, making it shake for minutes afterwards. 

‘What was the angel's name?’ Father Montgomery, who was still completely calm despite his assistant, who was still bristling with anger.

Valdese risked a glance back at his daemon. She showed no obvious signs of acknowledgement, but to Valdese, he knew that she had silently agreed with him to not say Xaphania’s name. They knew that she was already an enemy of the Church.

‘Cassiel,’ he replied in an instant, replicating the tone he had previously spoken in.

The two men shared another knowing look, and the taller one turned to Valdese.

‘We’re going to need you to be cooperative with us, because it is us who set the rules here. Tomorrow, first thing in the morning, we are going to run some tests on you, and we will discuss everything else when we get to it.’ 

Valdese didn’t like the sound of that. He knew the tests were not going to be pleasant. But the two men had nothing left to say and left the room, talking while doing so. Although he didn’t know if he was supposed to hear it, he heard exactly what they were saying, or rather, Evin heard exactly what they were saying.

‘He’s important but dangerous. We need him on our side.’

‘We also need the ability to cross between worlds now, so we can speak to Oliver Payne again, but we know what will happen if the ability to travel between worlds is put into different hands,’ Valdese had no idea what this meant, but both the men clearly did. If the girl Lyra Belaqua managed to travel between the worlds, it will be the end of the Church. The sword and the hourglass alethiometer symbols had told them that as soon as Fra Pavel had got to the second meaning of the wild man.

* * *

After midsummer’s day, Lyra went back to her now-ordinary life. She would spend a lot of time at lectures, or doing essays, but spent most of it either in her study room studying her alethiometer or spending time with Josephine, whether it was just going for a leisurely walk in the great Summer weather, or going to George’s, their favourite cafe in Oxford. 

But although she didn’t know it, today would be different. She had heard about the disruption in the Church after the man had opened the window in the North, and had thought for a short amount of time that she could travel to the North and go back to Will, but when she asked Ma Costa to take her on her narrowboat up to Svalbard, she had told her that the window had been closed within days of it opening. But it did still puzzle Lyra, since she knew a lot about Dust and had, to her horror, witnessed a window opening not because of the subtle knife first-hand, how a single person and his daemon could muster up that amount of Dust and energy required to open a window. Surely he hadn’t severed himself from his daemon? He probably would’ve died from it because like Lord Asriel (she refused to ever call him her father), he didn’t have the same equipment the Magisterium did to severe people and keep them alive. 

But after learning that the window had been closed, she hadn’t spared much thought on it, because for the first time since she and Will had parted, she felt happy.

Until four days after Midsummer’s day, when two men knocked on her study room door. She knew their sex because of the heavy footsteps and the strong, masculine knocking. She also recognised them as soon as they barged in as people from the Magisterium. The Master and Dame Hannah, looking apologetically at Lyra, came in after them.

Lyra and Pan understood immediately. The two old friends of Lyra were only accompanying the men because they didn’t trust them; no one in their right mind would. 

She offered the men a drink, but they impolitely declined to Lyra’s unsurprise. They sat down without asking on her sofa while Lyra had to sit on her bed. 

To her annoyance, Hannah and the old Master of Jordan College, the only name Lyra would only address him by, had to stand.

Lyra didn’t take her eyes off the man, though, and Pan didn’t seem to be intimidated at all by the men’s cat and dog daemons. 

She wasn’t scared in the slightest by these men, or by the Magisterium in general. Sure, she and Will had killed their Authority, opened a window from the World of the Dead and restored Dust, but after all of that, she wasn’t scared of them. They could do anything they wanted to her, but she knew that the Church had no reign on the public anymore, and what little they did have wasn’t used to much extent.

‘Lyra Belaqua,’ the rather plump yet average size man with the cat daemon started.

‘Silvertongue,’ Lyra corrected sharply. She would not be addressed by anything but her proper name.

‘That is a nickname you were given. Your real name is Belaqua.’ The other man spoke.

She felt her blood boiling. How dare these men tell her what her name was and was not! She felt like she was going to lash out at one of them, if it was verbally or physically, she didn’t care, but both Hannah and the old Master shot her a warning glance. She calmed herself down and then replied.

‘I can choose what my name is, thank you very much.’ She stated in a matter-of-fact tone, and as a result of her stubbornness, the two Church men silently decided that they wouldn’t pursue any further into the topic, and it was a small victory for Lyra.

‘We know what you have done in the past six years, but we believe that everyone deserves a shot at forgiveness, and a second chance,’ the man with the cat daemon asked.

‘But why tell me all of this now? I haven’t been anywhere in the past three years, so why didn’t you tell me this three years ago?’ Lyra asked stubbornly.

This question evidently annoyed the two churchmen quite a lot. Instead they tried a different approach.

‘Have you seen the boy with eight fingers recently?’

This shocked Lyra, and it must have shown in her face. They definitely meant Will. The colour drained from her face. Hannah or the Master must have seen this.

‘I object, Father. That is a personal topic.’ She tried her best to be polite, but everyone in the room knew it was just to prevent an argument.

‘Do you have any intentions of travelling to any other worlds anytime soon?’ he asked, although Lyra knew that they knew that there were none left open.

‘Yes, actually. I think I might go on a leisurely holiday with my family to another world. Maybe somewhere with nice weather and a beach.’ Her tone was sour and sarcastic.

‘What do you know about Dust?’ the large one asked, and Lyra was going to ponder herself what to say about this, because she certainly wasn’t going to tell them the truth- she was Lyra Silvertongue, but Pan squeaked as he bounded down under the bed as Hannah signalled for them both to. Lyra did the same. Seconds later, there were now nine people in the room, excluding their daemons.

From under her bed, Lyra recognised the Church men, with guns trained to their heads by a woman Lyra didn’t know, or at least didn’t remember, and a man she didn’t recognise either. But she knew everyone else. There were the old Master at Jordan College and Dame Hannah Relf, who had both been there before, Dr Polstead, Lyra’s old teacher, and Mrs Lonsdale, to Lyra’s surprise. 

She gestured that Lyra could come out of her hiding space.

Now with a full view of what had happened, Lyra and Pan could see that the two people whom they didn’t recognise were holding the two Church men in a headlock in one hand, while with the other holding a gun to their heads.

Lyra was extremely confused. She had a lot of questions and no answers. She tried to organise her mind and ask them one at a time, but they all blurted out at once.

‘Who are you? Why are you here? Why are you going to kill the Church men? Are you trying to protect me?’

Dr Polstead rushed towards her and greeted her in a warm handshake, with Mrs Lonsdale at his side.

‘Look, Lyra, I know you have a lot of questions, but we don’t have the answers to all of them. In fact, that leads on nicely to what I wanted to tell you next. We are an organisation called Oakley Street, mainly based on taking down the Church, and we are, like you, searching for answers. Some of us are going to High Brasil tomorrow, and some of us are going to Africa, to find what we need to find. You must, at all costs, hide from the Church. Out of Oxford, if you can manage. Thanks to Hannah’s interpretations of the alethiometer, we know that they have gotten hold of something very important, and now they are focusing on finding you. And I know you have been hunted by the Church before. But this time they have the intentions to kill.’ His voice was stern and serious. If this was meant to have given Lyra some answers, it had done the complete opposite. In a matter of minutes, she had just gone from having a somewhat ordinary life again, to a chaotic one, where she would be being constantly pursued by the Church. 

‘But why? If they wanted me, why didn’t they just get me there?’

‘Because Hannah and I were there,’ the old Master at Jordan College spoke for the first time.

‘But why do they want me?’

‘For reasons you wouldn’t understand,’ Mrs Lonsdale told her gravely, ‘We don’t even understand the reasons fully.’

‘Of course I would understand! It is about me!’ she insisted, but it was no use. 

‘Oakley Street’ was clearly in a hurry, and then Lyra realised that the two Church men were still there, with the guns still forced to their heads by the two people Lyra didn’t recognise.

She wasn’t shocked when the two shots were fired, and the blood spilled onto the carpet. What else could they have done? They couldn’t have held them captive when they were going to different continents, and they definitely couldn’t send them back to the Magisterium. Pan watched a tiny bit sorrowfully as the two daemons rose up into a cloud of Dust. 

‘Just remember, watch your back, and stay out of the way of the Church at all costs. There are places which are safe, but with the new Master, and the Church snooping around the place anyway, I don’t think even Oxford is safe.’ Dr Polstead explained, leaving Lyra with even more questions, but they were all on their way out now, and thankfully they had taken the bodies with them.

‘Dr Polstead was lying when he said that they were searching for answers,’ Pan informed her.

‘Why would he do that? Surely, if they want to take down the Church, I should go with them? But we’ve got more important things to worry about, Pan.’

‘Like where we are going to go,’ her daemon finished for her.

‘But how do we know if they were lying about that or not? Maybe they just need us out of the way for something?’

‘Lyra, who do we trust more? The Church or Dr Polstead, Dame Hannah, Mrs Lonsdale and the Old Master at Jordan College?’

Lyra understood her daemon’s reasoning, but she still wasn’t sure if she was on Dr Polstead’s side or not. 

‘Oxford is our home, and I don’t want to leave it without a very good reason, and I know you feel the same way, Pan.’

He did agree with Lyra, but he felt that Dr Polstead and the other people who had come into the room had a very good reason, but they just didn’t have enough time to tell them. 

‘What if… Lyra, what if all of this may eventually lead… lead to Will and Kirjava?’ his voice was quiet, but Lyra could hear the melancholy tone to his voice, but it was also tinted with a glint of hope.

‘Then it would be worth it. But Pan, what are the chances of that? How?’

‘What if it’s about that man? The russian man who opened the window all on his own? Remember they told us that the Church had gotten hold of something important. What if it is him? Then we really could see them. Lyra, I think we really should listen to Dr Polstead.’

Lyra felt tears creep up into the corners of her eyes, and she knew that Pan was feeling the same way. She wanted to shout at him, she wanted to be angry, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t be angry; he was just so desperate like her.

‘Maybe we can trust them.’

But Pan felt that there was something which was creeping back into Lyra’s mind.

‘We can’t leave Josephine, not this shortly after we’ve found a friend again.’ 

‘You want to take her as well, don’t you?’ Pan could sense that his assumption was correct.

‘But what if she doesn’t want to come?’

‘I wouldn’t blame her, but we can ask her,’ Pan offered. 

Like it had been ever since they had parted with Will, hope was all they had. They were clinging onto every ounce of it they had, but as they both knew, most of the time, hope wasn’t enough. 


	9. The heist

****

**25 June**

The first thing Will saw when he opened his eyes again was Dr Mary Malone pacing across the kitchen, holding in her hand a familiar yet strangely distant object, which had decided Will’s fate at one point in his life. The amber spyglass.

As he strained his back to sit up, he felt Kirjava’s fur beneath his wounded arm.

His wound. 

Seconds after reminding himself of the painful incision in his arm he felt the searing pain once more.

As he sat up, the sudden movement attracted Mary’s eyes. 

She casually glanced over at him, but was too busy putting away the spyglass to enhance any conversation.

‘What were you doing with that?’ Will asked.

‘It doesn’t matter…’

‘Yes, it does matter. ‘Cause the last time you had a look at that was in a different world, and although I haven’t ever looked through it, I know that it shows you Dust. So frankly, I think it does matter!’ Will interrupted.

‘What matters is what happened at the bench, and who it was who shot you.’ Mary said stubbornly.

It was hurting every time Will spoke now, but he was in a very bad mood after his time with Lyra had been interrupted rather rudely, and he wanted to pursue the subject, especially since all of the things which had been happening with Mary’s colleague and the weird coincidences which were suggesting that maybe, just maybe, the Magisterium were now in his world.

‘What were you looking at it for?’ Will demanded, his voice crossing the line between annoyed and angry.

Despite the fact that Mary knew that Will wouldn’t drop the subject, she was still reluctant to tell Will.

‘I was just curious- just checking that the Dust flow was still normal, and it is. So we’re fine.’

It was evident to Will and Kirjava that she was lying, especially after spending years with a master liar. Mary should’ve got some lessons from Lyra.

‘Why are you breaking a promise which you made to her?’ Will asked her, his voice raised and the anger was apparent, because Mary turned away from him, ashamed; they both knew what promise he was referencing. 

Mary finally conceded that she had to tell them the truth.

‘I thought that if we were right in assuming there was another window between worlds, then the Dust flow would be affected, but it hasn’t been. So that means…’

Will’s heart dropped. That was exactly what had been anticipating, or rather fearing, and he fell back down onto the sofa, Kirjava lying down next to him. 

He gently stroked her, waiting, hoping that Mary would say something else. But she didn’t, and so Kirjava, the only calm part of Will, started talking instead.

‘You know what we need right now? We need the truth. We need an alethiometer, like Lyra’s.’

‘Well, we don’t have one. There aren’t any in our world, remember? And even if we did get our hands onto one, then we would need a damn good reader to decipher even the easiest of answers.’ 

‘But… we don’t necessarily need an alethiometer, do we? We just need the truth.’ Will saw where his daemon was going with this, and joined in, backing her up.

Mary, however, did not like where this conversation was going at all. She immediately regretted even suggesting that stealing the Cave back was a possible idea. She looked to her daemon for help.

‘There is no way you are going to steal back something from a building in your current state!’ Zakriya told them.

‘But we both know that we need that, especially _if_ the Magisterium is in our world, then we need it, and we both know that you won’t be able to get it on your own.’ Will retorted.

Mary arched an eyebrow, and looked like she was going to shoot back a response before Will realised that he hadn’t told Mary about the Dust which had surrounded him and Kirjava when he had been thinking about Lyra. 

Mary must’ve seen the clarity in his face, because she bit back her response and let Will talk.

‘When we went to the bench today… Do you remember if Lyra ever described Dust to you?’ he asked instead, not sure if Mary would understand him. But Mary nodded instantly to Will’s relief- he didn’t want to explain it to her.

‘Well, when we went to the bench today, whenever we thought about both of them, it just surrounded us, like it was going to consume us, or like a protective forcefield, but when we stopped thinking about them, it just disappeared.’

Mary thought this wasn’t impossible, remembering the incredible amount of Dust which had been attracted to them when they had come back from looking for their daemons in the world of the mulefu.

‘I can’t explain the exact logic to you, but it is possible that there is a lot more Dust attracted to you two then any other two lovers ever before,’ Mary explained.

Will bit back a smile- he liked the sound of that.

‘We could always ask the Cave,’ Kirjava told them.

Mary knew that they were right on that behalf; she wouldn’t stand a chance of stealing it on her own, and even in his current state, Will stood more of a chance than her, but she should also come with him, because otherwise, if something bad happened to him, it would be the hardest thing in the world to explain that to Elaine, and the possibilities of what the Magisterium would do were endless.

‘Fine, we’ll go in a few days, but first you need to get some proper rest to help heal your wound.’ Mary finally conceded.

* * *

** 26 June **

‘Mal, can you row us there?’ Alice asked him, clearly saying it as a joke (or at least, Malcolm hoped it was a joke).

Oakley Street were having trouble getting a boat from the Brytain port of Cornwall to High Brasil, where Malcolm, Alice, Bud Schlesinger and Candace Jones were all going to bargain with the president of High Brasil, Carlos Dias, to see how much of an army they could muster up just from the South of the Americas, while the other members of Oakley Street would go to Africa to speak with King Ogunwe for the same purpose.

‘Mal, what if we hired you a decent boat, then could you row us?’ Alice asked.

‘Alice, you know my rowing ability diminished a long time ago!’ Malcolm informed her.

They were standing back watching as Candace and Bud bargained with a sailor, who had originally been their last resort- just one look at his dirty and rusty boat made up your mind for you, but now they had no choice.

The other members of Oakley Street had had more luck when they tried to hire a boat- they had left Cornwall a few hours prior- but the boats that were on course for High Brasil all too long, no sailor seemed to dare take the faster route, which would take them through the bermuda triangle, which had been rumoured in their world to contain sights and monsters worse than anywhere else in the world for a long, long time. 

It had once been rumoured that a Magisterium vessel had been swallowed whole by a monster in the bermuda triangle, and the boat and crew had never been found. 

But the possibility of Malcolm rowing them there was becoming ever more likely.

‘I’m afraid the price is far too high and the time is far too slow,’ Bud admitted as he made his way back to Malcolm and Alice, followed shortly by Candace- clearly the negotiations hadn’t gone too well.

‘Ships have gone there before from this port, and have never come back. It’s something to do with the two currents of the two different seas meeting,’ Candace explained.

‘Can’t we get a message across to High Brasil so president Carlos can send some transport?’ Alice asked.

‘We need as much time as we can get in High Brasil, and that would take twice as long as any of these offers,’ Malcolm pointed out.

‘Can we find out if we can hire a boat? I know from first-hand experience that Malcolm is a great rower, and he claims that he can sail as well,’ Alice told them.

Malcolm scowled at her indignantly.

‘I can see, but are you sure we can trust Malcolm’s rowing to get us across the bermuda triangle? Surely if a Magisterium vessel can’t make it across it, then what chance does Malcolm stand?’ Bud asked.

‘What other chance do we have?’ Candace countered.

Malcolm was going to argue, but Candace had already gone off to see where they could get one.

Malcolm sighed, kneeling down to stroke Asta.

The sun was setting, and it made a pretty picture as it sunk in a picturesque manner under the horizon, making an orangey-pink colour. The clouds which were passing over were transparent, letting the sunset flow through them.

The bustling port had many voices but over them Malcolm could make out Candace’s.

‘Good news! We’ve got a sailing boat! And it’s surprisingly cheap!’ she shouted over to Malcolm and Alice.

As Candace walked over to Bud, Malcolm felt Alice’s comforting arm over his shoulder.

‘Don’t worry, Mal, it’ll all be alright.’ She smiled at him as Asta rested her head on Ben.

Malcolm smiled a warming smile at Alice.

‘I hope so. But it’s all happened so quickly, we’ve acted quite impulsively, even if we have multiple sources of information, I’m not sure if we’ve done the right thing. I mean, I feel bad for Lyra. We just left so suddenly, we didn’t even properly say goodbye. She must be so confused. We just came, told her briefly that the Magisterium was chasing her again, and that she needed to get out of Oxford, and then we went,’ Malcolm explained.

Alice seemed to understand; Malcolm and Asta even had a sneaking suspicion that Alice and Ben knew about how they felt about Lyra and Pan.

‘You two done canoodling, ‘cause we need to get out of Cornwall before the Magisterium trace our steps and realise where we’re going?’ Bud asked.

Malcolm and Alice’s identical looks of confusion enhanced Candace to tell them what the alethiometer had told them the night prior.

‘She figured out that the CCD are now focusing on capturing Lyra, and that they’ve also figured out the further prophecy about her and that we are recruiting an army,’ she explained.

And indeed all of the answers which Hannah had deciphered were all correct, and the Magisterium were searching for Lyra, Oakley Street and, although none of them knew it yet, Will as well. 

But the Magisterium had an extremely useful tool, or rather weapon. Perhaps even more useful and dangerous than the subtle knife itself. 

* * *

The eerie silence of the moonlight crept into the room through the half-open blinds, as Father Montgomery silently surveyed the snowy landing grounds for the zeppelins at Bolvangar.

His eagle daemon Athena sat perched on the side of his desk, not blinking as she didn’t take her eyes off the spotlights outside which searched for any sign of movement on the ground below.

Then came a faint, almost timid, knock on the door.

Instead of breaking the untouched and perfect silence, Montgomery walked towards the door and opened it for Father Jian, who looked surprised to see Father Montgomery.

‘Oh, I didn’t expect to see you up this late, I thought you were asleep, that’s why I knocked quietly,’ he explained as Montgomery sat down at the desk once more, gesturing for his assistant to keep quiet and to sit down opposite him.

‘The man, Valdese Gramovski, we’re going to start running the tests on him tomorrow, while we figure out more about the organisation which Fra Pavel discovered through the alethiometer. Oakley Street, he said the name was,’ Father Jian informed him.

‘Why can’t we start running tests now. We might live in a world of witches, armoured bears and alethiometers, but time is really the greatest weapon in any world, Father Jian. Think about if we had complete control over time. We could do anything we wanted. We could erase the mistakes which we’ve made in the past, and we could see what happens in the future, and what actions cause that, and make it perfect for ourselves.’ Montgomery told him.

‘We can if you want, I just thought that maybe it would’ve been better to wait until tomorrow.’

‘I would like to oversee everything which happens, because the equipment which we are using is over six year old, and I don’t trust it one bit.’

‘Yes, you may definitely do that,’ Father Jian assured him.

Although he was well-built and muscular, and could beat many people in a fight, when he was in a room with Father Montgomery, there was a sense of superiority, which he casted over everyone he saw. The only person Jian had seen who wasn’t affected had been Valdese Gramovski, who cast his own spell of superiority, sort of like two lions fighting over land.

As they made their way out of the room, Father Montgomery strided ahead of his assistant, who was tired after his lack of sleep after the past few days.

Father Jian indicated to a door on his left, his dog daemon holding it open for them.

‘This is the control room, where we can survey everything which happens.’

‘So what are we planning on doing?’ Montgomery couldn’t help but ask.

‘If we do what the General Oblation Board were doing, and sever him from his daemon, with the energy he is already capable of gathering, we would just like to see what the effects are,’ Fermin, Jian’s cat daemon, answered for him.

‘With that amount of energy caused, there would be a rapture in the veil between worlds,’ Athena told them.

‘Maybe, but we don’t know for sure, so we want to be certain that he does have this ability, and that he can use it at will, because it could be nearly as useful as having complete control over time,’ Jian pointed out, and Montgomery seemed to agree.

Just as they were going to continue their conversation, below them they watched as Valdese was dragged by two huge and intimidating men. 

Evin’s coat was covered in white drops of snow as she was pulled along by the two men’s daemons.

Montgomery watched curiously as Valdese struggled half-heartedly to pull himself out of the strong, firm grip. 

One of the men’s dog daemon scratched its paw down onto Evin’s fur, drawing blood purposefully. 

Feeling the pain instantly, Valdese ceased his attempts to get out of the grip. It was if he had just been attacked by a Spectre. His eyes were dull, he wasn’t moving and his legs were sprawled limply on the cold and grey floor.

Now they were right beside the machine, and one of them men let go of Valdese to open the door for a second, and that was when he lashed out.

He kicked out with his leg as Evin rolled over onto her back before pouncing onto one of the dog daemons. 

But the men had been expecting, because the one which had been opening the door swiftly jumped back to assist his companion and slammed a fist into Valdese’ abdomen, winding him as they regained control of him and their daemons regained control of Evin.

As the two metallic doors were opened, Valdese and Evin were shoved into the large cage of pale silver mesh, above which the great shining blade hung poised, as if it was grinning sadistically at the unspeakable crime it was about to commit.

Valdese looked up in horror at the blade which was about to separate him from his daemon, it was about to cut through the unique relationship which connected a human to their daemon as easily as cutting through a loaf of bread.

Father Montgomery leaned forward, inspecting the action. His eyes widened as next to him, Father Jian pulled down a handle and pressed a certain set of buttons. 

The effect was evident. The silver guillotine was slowly and painfully coming down.

Evin made a desperate rasping yowl and cast one last look at her human, a look of regret, sorrow and melancholy knowledge.

The guillotine was still coming down.

The blade was so far down that when Valdese looked at his daemon, he could only see the bottom half of her. 

Tears were flowing down his face- he couldn’t remember the last time he cried. He wanted to shout, to protest as loudly and hard as he could, but he couldn’t find his voice. 

He thought instead of things which would comfort him, so he and Evin could perhaps rest in peace. He thought about his house in Asia in this world, and in his homeland of Russia, in his world. That would be his only true home. The snow which came in the winter which was so deep you could submerge yourself fully so that no one could see you, and the sadness when the inevitable Spring sun came and melted it away. Home. 

And then the blade came down.

The effect wasn’t instant; it took a few seconds before the resounding sound came and everyone in the room, even everyone in the Station itself, were sent flying backwards. 

The two men who had deposited Valdese and Evin cold-heartedly into the cages were sent backwards into the wall with such force that they were both killed instantly.

The two churchmen had been affected as well; the glass had been shattered immediately and although Father Jian had been sent flying backwards to the ground, unconscious, Father Montgomery had been expecting the impact and still stood on his two feet, even if some of the glass had dug into his legs and torso.

Even the cage hadn’t stood a chance. 

Being the thing which had accommodated the separation and the consequent explosion of energy, it had broken instantly into millions of pieces, and through it you could see the human and the daemon lying limply on the floor, their legs sprawled lifelessly on the glass-covered floor.

Then a small sign of life. An unnoticeable movement.

A tiny twitch of her whiskers.

A little lift of his leg.

And then the opening of an eye, only to be shut again as quickly as it had opened. 

Evin managed to look in front of her. There were drops of morning dew on thick grass and many, many trees which towered over them (where had they come from?). 

The sound of birdsong and the chatter of animals, but no sign of human life (were they in heaven? Evin doubted it after all the sins which they had committed in their life).

But then she realised, as she mustered up the effort to look behind her, that it was a window into another world. But for the first time in her life, she noticed that her human was asleep and she wasn’t.

But that wouldn’t last long; she was extremely tired, and when she put her head back down onto the floor, she drifted off instantly.

* * *

**29 June**

Will and Mary were walking in silence through the quiet and eerie streets of Oxford at midnight. Every sound they made; every footstep, every breath, every movement sounded like it could be heard from miles away.

There weren’t many people around, but the people who did walk casually past them cast strange and weary glances at Kirjava, who was walking as inconspicuous as she could next to her human and Mary.

‘Are we close?’ Will breathed to Mary.

‘We take out first left and then our second right, then one of the early buildings on our right.’ She explained.

Will gestured to his daemon to run ahead to check if anything, or anyone was there, but they were all clear. For now.

With each stride forward both Will and Mary grew in their nervousness, but they tried their best not to show it- holding their heads high and walking as confidently as they could.

As Kirjava came back to Will, she informed him that the building was being occupied, and that the porter on the ground floor wasn’t currently there, and that the lights on the third floor were on, and Mary told them that was the floor the laboratory was on.

As they continued walking, on their right Mary pointed out the place where the window had been on Sunderland Avenue which they had both entered and left their world through.

Will noticed the hornbeam trees and with surprise and pleasure, that there were three much smaller trees next to them, and he recognised them with a mixture of sadness and joy as the wheel trees from the world of the mulefu.

He was going to point them out to Kirjava, but she had already noticed them, and she was walking over to them herself, crossing the road to be closer to the comfort and seemingly protection which they gave Will and Kirjava.

Mary smiled at them from across the road; she allowed them to have this moment where they could both remember and recall what they had done for everyone, everything else which lived, not just in their world but in the millions of others as well, and the sacrifice which he had given for everything else. 

But not just what he sacrificed, he knew that Lyra and Pan had done and felt exactly the same as he and Kirjava did, and that comforted them both.

But as Mary started walking again, their time under the baby wheel trees was cut short and they had to get to the laboratory again, and get the Cave, and then… Will realised that neither him nor Mary knew what they were going to do once they got it back. Was it just to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Magisterium? Or would it tell them that it was all part of something bigger than that?

Will supposed that it would tell them if they got it back. But he knew that it was a big ‘if’. A very big ‘if’.

Without realising it, they reached the laboratory in very little time- Will supposed it was either because he didn’t know how far it was, or because he was stressing and that had meant he walked faster without him noticing it. 

‘Zakriya, can you look through the windows on the third floor. Kirjava inferred that they’re open so can you tell us which room the Cave is on, and if there are any other people in there.’ Mary told her daemon, as Will and Kirjava attempted to see him.

As he flew upwards elegantly, his wings beat gracefully and powerfully in rhythm with the gentle breeze. The moonlight shone upon him like a spotlight, the white light illuminating his black coat and his yellow beak.

Eventually he stopped in mid-air and landed on a window-sill and peeked inside.

From where Will, Mary and Kirjava were positioned at the foot of the building, they couldn’t see the alpine chough, but soon enough she came swooping down quickly towards them again. 

For a moment they thought he was going to hit the ground, and at the pace he was going, he would’ve died instantly, but at the last second he pulled out, landing on Mary’s shoulder.

As Will and Kirjava pulled themselves out of the trance they had to put themselves in to see him, Mary asked the questions they had all been anticipating.

‘Was there any other people there, and in which room is the Cave?’ she asked nervously, sharing the feelings of Will and Kirjava.

‘Yes. About five to eight armed men on the third floor, and only some of the windows are open, and none of them show the Cave, so either it isn’t there or it’s in one of the rooms where the windows are closed.’

Then came the question which had been prompted by Zakriya’s original response. They all held their breath as Kirjava asked it.

‘Did the men have daemons?’

‘Yes.’

* * *

The alethiometer fell perfectly into the soft velvet bag he put it in. As Pantalaimon crawled over towards their wardrobe, tugging out Lyra’s best outfit and dumping it into the suitcase which she had put unwillingly on the bed.

She was out taking a walk in the St Sophia’s grounds after her and Pan had had a heated argument and Pan had decided to make himself useful while she was gone.

He leapt up onto the top of the wardrobe before jumping down onto the cupboard, searching for anything of any worth. But he knew that it was pointless; Lyra would never agree to leaving Oxford. He told himself that he should do something else which his human might appreciate. 

He and Lyra having lengthy arguments was something which happened quite often now, even if neither of them enjoyed them in the slightest, and it left both their souls feeling ripped and torn apart. The subject and reason for their arguments varied, and it had been like that ever since Oakley Street had shown up and killed the Churchmen. 

Lyra had constantly refused even considering leaving Oxford, leaving St Sophia’s, leaving her home, for such a stupid purpose, and therefore neither of them had asked Josephine if she would be willing to come with them depending where they went.

So he slowly snuck out of their study-room through the window, careful to stay out of sight- he was a daemon without his human, in his world nothing could be scarier and stranger.

He climbed lovingly up the vent which led up from the kitchen and onto the roofs- he remembered all the times he and Lyra had done this not just at St Sophia’s but during her entire childhood at Jordan. No matter what the world and even death itself did to them, whether it violently took away her best friend in a way which she would never forget, or it separated her from her only true love she would ever have, nothing would ever take the ability to climb and run wildly and freely over the Jordan and St Sophia roofs. 

He leapt from building to building, from rooftop to rooftop, as the slight breeze turned to a rushing wind as he ran at a brilliant pace. 

At one point he even spotted his human walking in the grounds and was tempted to call out to her or to run over to her in joy, but remembered how their argument had ended with a pang of sadness and carried on running over the rooftops.

Josephine and Jairus, her sparrow daemon who Pan had taken to quickly, and they had become fast friends, lived on the other side of the building. 

But the distance wasn’t that far for Pan at the speed he was going, carefree and loving every second. But how he wished Kirjava was here with him. He wished she could share his enjoyment. How he wished their humans could sit (he restricted his mind from imagining their humans doing anything more than sitting and passionately kissing each other) in the Botanical Gardens while the daemons ran across the college roofs.

But he reached the end of the building and slid down the vent until he got to the window which he recognised as Josephine and Jairus’, where he jumped off the vent onto the window sill. 

He and Lyra had told her about their journeys to other worlds and Lord Asriel’s war, because they knew that they could trust them not to tell anyone else, so Josephine wasn’t shocked when Pan tapped three times on the glass pane., but she did ask where Lyra was, and in answer to her question Pan told her that she was just out running some errands for Dame Hannah.

‘Why have you come here then?’ Jairus asked after touching noses with Pan (it was the civil act of courtesy between daemons).

Pan thought about what he should tell them. Should he delve straight into the topic about why he has come and what they thought about leaving Oxford? Or should she just have a conversation and then ask her about her opinion?

‘I’ve come here on behalf of Lyra and I, because we were paid a visit a few days ago by two Churchemen and some old friends of ours, and Dame Hannah,’ he explained, ‘and our old friends came in while the Churchmen were there and… killed them, but they also told us that the Magisterium were hunting us down again, and that we needed to get out of Oxford as soon as we could, and then they left. But we wanted to know if you would come with us, because we dismissed the possibility of leaving you and Jairus.’

Unsurprisingly, both Josephine and Jairus looked taken aback. Lyra’s story about her experiences with Will of armoured bears, witches, ghosts and a great war was confusing and unbelievable enough, but the fact that it was carrying on right in front of their eyes was even worse.

The silence was understandable as Pan jumped off Josephine's desk and onto the floor then up to their bed. Even though they could separate, he still felt uncomfortable without Lyra and like a part of him was missing. 

He looked on as Jairus shared a look with his human before answering Pan.

‘We would be willing to go with you. We owe you something after all you did for us at Bolvangar. If it wasn’t for you and Lyra, we wouldn’t be here together, in fact, we might even be dead like the poor boy Tony Makarios. Because we knew him very well, and was very sad when Lyra told us all at the Station that he was dead. Because he was our cousin.’

This shocked Pan. He hadn’t known anything about this. The look of sadness for Josephine and Jairus which showed all across his face was genuine.

The words which he tried to force out of his mouth stumbled over each other, as if they were in a one-legged race to come out first.

‘I’m so sorry… I didn’t know, we did think about his family when we found him, but we didn’t know…’ 

Josephine nodded. Her eyes were tinted with sadness although she was trying not to show it, like she was trying to hide the tears that were creeping into her eyes.

‘We would be glad to come with you, even if we lose our lives because of it, Jairus and I owe something to you and Lyra.’ This time it was Josephine who spoke.

‘Lyra will be happy to hear that. It might make her consider the decision again,’ Pan told her as he crept back out of the window before saying goodbye and leaping back up onto the rooftops, thinking of what Lyra’s expression would be when he told her that they were willing to come and that their cousin was Tony Makarios.

* * *

Instead of the porter who was usually there and who Mary had been friends with when she had used to work in the dark matter research group, they were greeted by a sign saying, ‘closed’ and no doors opened. Even the elevator was disabled.

‘Don’t people live here? How are they going to get out of the house?’ Kirjava asked.

‘Well, from memory, there was an emergency fire exit around the back,’ Mary explained.

So as they made their way around to the rear of the building, they discussed what they would do once they got to the third floor, and how they would convince the armed Magisterium guards that they meant no harm and that they were on the same side, or if they would have to convince them physically.

‘Leave them to me; I’m not sure you’ll be able to hold your own against them, especially if they’re armed,’ Will told her, to which she arched an eyebrow.

‘Your mum wouldn’t approve if she knew that I let you die because you told me that I wouldn’t be able to fight them, but we don’t necessarily have to fight them, do we?’ she pointed out as Will opened the door.

The metal staircase spiralled up in front of them at the back of the room they had just entered.

It looked like the backstage of a movie set. Boxes were stacked up messily and all of the walls were such a black, similar colour that you couldn’t tell where one ended and the next began. 

But even so, they could just make out the staircase which stood between some huge piles of boxes which were put up like goalposts. There was no one else in the room.

As they walked cautiously up the stairs, Kirjava went ahead to check for any people of potential danger once again.

When she came back, Will felt like part of him which had just been taken out of him was put back in and let out a sigh of relief.

‘There’s no one ahead of us- it looks like most of the doors have been shut and locked, and the third floor isn’t any different.’ She informed them.

They passed the first and second floors and Will, Mary and Zakariya saw what Kirjava had been talking about. 

When Will carefully pulled down the handle to check it didn’t budge at all. 

‘How are we going to get into there without causing a commotion?’ he asked Kirjava. Who had seen what they had done to the door, which had a lot more security than the others.

‘There’s no way we can get in without breaking the door, but maybe if the back door is locked, then the elevator entrance isn’t, because they’ve disabled it,’ she pointed out, and Will saw her train of thought.

‘So if we get into this door and get out through the elevator entrance here then we could climb up into the one above,’ Will finished for his daemon, and although Mary didn’t look the least bit comfortable with it, she couldn’t see any other way of doing it, and they needed to get the Cave.

Will stepped backwards before sprinting forwards with his leg outstretched and kicking the door straight off its hinges with a thud. Millions of specks of dust scattered onto his clothes and onto the floor, pointing towards the speculation that there was no one in there, and they were right.

The lights were easy to find, and were needed because the darkness outside didn’t let any light inside. 

Kirjava and Zakariya raced to the back of the room where they saw two metal panels with a narrow gap in between which would open when an elevator arrived there. 

The gap was big enough for Will to fit his fingers in it and with all his strength he managed to push them to the side enough so that there was now a gap big enough for him, Mary, Kirjava and Zakariya to fit through.

He went first, finding his way above in the dim light which only came from the floor they were on. There were many things sticking out such as vents, wires and bars to support the elevator which Will could climb up on. 

Mary went next, following Will’s example by finding catches which she could hold onto, but she made the mistake of looking down. It wasn’t that far, but it was enough to break multiple bones and possibly die from the fall. She lost her footing and the grip she had held with her left hand, and was hanging on for dear life.

Will, who already had one hand on the next floor’s elevator shaft, put the other hand dangling for Mary to grab. She did so reluctantly, but the weight which was now put on Will was too much. He pulled as much as he could and managed to get Mary’s left hand onto the elevator shaft, like his, but with only three fingers holding onto it for him, his hand which was sweating with the effort slipped and he fell. 

He swung his arms out desperately, trying to find something, anything which he could cling onto, but nothing was close enough for him. 

But he landed a lot sooner than he had expected. He felt a sharp pain in his back, like something was out of place, and something jutting out in his right leg. 

But nothing else hurt. He looked beneath him, and saw that the elevator was going up. Kirjava and Zakariya leapt onto the elevator and Mary did too, but Will was just relieved that he wasn’t dead.

He sat up to a stab of pain and a rush of adrenaline in his back, but soon saw that the elevator was stopping at the third floor. He put his ear to the roof of the lift because there were three voices which could be distinguished. One sounded very in control, he sounded Russian, if Will would’ve guessed, another was female, a smooth and silky voice, and the other sounded quite English, but very scared. Mary’s face went pale.

‘That’s Oliver Payne!’ she whispered desperately. All the colour had been drained from her face, but Will kept his ear held down against the elevator, listening intently to what the two men were saying.

‘So are you sure you can read it?’ It was the Russian.

‘Well, I’m sure I can, because I’ve done it before, but if I can’t, I know someone who definitely can, but she isn’t going to come willingly,’ he explained, and even from where they were eavesdropping Will and Mary could hear the nervousness in his voice. 

Then a ding sounded as the lift reached the third floor, and then two men left the lift and entered the room. And Will saw the man who Mary had called Oliver Payne.

‘He’s the man who shot me!’ he whispered, keeping his voice low and quiet.

Mary looked at him incredulously. 

‘Are you sure?’

Will nodded with a flash of anger, but he forced it back down before he could act upon it.

The elevator began its descent and before it could get too low, Will, Mary and their daemons jumped onto the shaft, but the doors had already closed.

‘How do we get in now?’ Mary asked.

Now it dawned on them the situation which they were stuck in. Will’s newly found back pain was constant and almost unbearable, and the bullet wound had still not fully healed, in fact, it would take a long time before it healed again. 

But Will had an idea. He remembered how much damage he had done to Daniel Green the other day. Above him, he saw the bell which was activated when the elevator reached its destination, but it was out of his reach. However, Mary saw what he was doing and passed a thought to her daemon, who in response flew up and rang it instead. 

Will and Kirjava held themselves flat against the walls, and Mary and Zakariya followed suit. They waited and listened for any words which could be valuable.

‘Excuse me, sir, but is there anyone else we are expecting? I just heard the elevator bell ringing, but the door isn’t opening.’ It was a low, gruff voice, probably one of the armed guards Zakriya had mentioned.

Will heard the Russian say that they weren’t expecting anyone, but to check nonetheless.

Mary’s heart skipped a beat. There was a slow unhealthy creaking as the doors slid to either side. 

Will shot Mary a look. Zakariya flew before anyone else in a flurry of wings and feathers as Kirjava jumped in, attacking the nearest daemon she could see, which was a dog. 

Will followed his daemon and slammed his bleeding fist into the man who had shot him earlier as hard as he could. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Mary leap in and Will couldn’t help but smile as she scrapped her original plan and kicked out at the guard in between his legs as he dropped his gun. 

The man who Mary had called, ‘Oliver Payne’ had been knocked out by Will’s first punch, and Kirjava had one the battle she had held against the guard’s daemon, and the guard was in thorough pain, and Will felt quite bad for him. 

But the Russian still stood firm and tall, not backing out as Will had expected him to. His daemon was a jaguar who now bared its teeth at Kirjava, who seemed so small compared to her. 

In his hand he held a pistol and he aimed it at Mary’s head. But although no one but Mary could see it, Zakariya had taken advantage of her invisibility and had flown ahead of his human and Kirjava, and was now searching for the Cave. 

Their separation was affecting Mary and her daemon, but it was their only choice.

‘And who exactly are you?’ he asked casually, with the gun still trained expertly on Mary’s head. He was expecting an answer, though, looking at Will first.

‘Will Parry,’ he told him. There was no point in lying; the Magisterium didn’t know his name.

But apparently it had an effect on the Russian. His grip on the gun faltered and Will took advantage. 

Kirjava pounced onto the back of the Russian’s jaguar daemon, who had lost her concentration as well as her human, and Will snatched the gun from his outstretched hand. 

Kirjava, digging her claws deep into the jaguar’s thin coat, drew blood before the Russian and her daemon regained consciousness. 

  
  


Millions of thoughts had flown through his mind as soon as the boy had mentioned the name, ‘Parry’, and it was the only pain of his cat daemon attacking Evin that brought him back to his original state. Maybe the boy was lying. But how would he have known about him and John Parry? 

The woman who had been with him had now sprinted ahead, but Valdese was only interested in the boy.

The boy threw a fist at Valdese’s head, who blocked it easily, before putting one hand on the gun barrel and the other grabbing his arm and twisting it a way which made him cry out in pain.

But Valdese was determined not to kill him.

Evin tossed the cat off her back like swatting a fly and pinned her down with all her weight, drawing the breath from the cat and the boy, who withdrew and backed off.

He dropped the gun only for Valdese to pick it back up and advance to the boy. His cat daemon had escaped Evin’s grasp and they were both on the edge; another step back and they would’ve fallen back into the elevator shaft. 

But to Will’s surprise, instead of shooting him, the Russian thrust the gun down the elevator shaft, and the thud as it hit the ground echoed ominously off the walls. 

The Russian took a step backwards and Will and Kirjava took an eager step forward. Then behind the man there were muffled cries and out of one of the rooms came Mary in a headlock and behind her was a guard, similar to the one which had met an unfortunate fate a few minutes ago. 

But Will knew that she wasn’t in agony because of the pain the guard was causing her, but because of the pain of being separated from her daemon. 

The guard looked surprised to see the Russian not fighting Will, who was surprised enough, but it was an even more surprised and confused look he wore when the Russian bent down, picked up the gun which the first guard had dropped and shot the other guard with precision accuracy; he could’ve hit Mary, maybe he even tried to hit Mary. 

This confused Will even more. The guard’s blood trickled down onto Mary’s head, who now crept out of the man’s grip and closer to her daemon. 

Will faced the Russian who was looking at him in a strange way. It wasn’t threatening in the least, more like he was recognising a long lost friend- it was a peaceful and sadly happy look. Like when Will thought about Lyra. 

Valdese recognised many aspects of John in the boy called Will, but he still wasn't sure- there must be a lot of Parrys. Even if John had never stopped talking about his newly born son. 

‘Was your father John Parry? He asked gently, his eyes still racing across his face, recognising the same eyes, the same way the end of his lips turned down into a sincere frown whenever he was confused, or angry, or worried, as John.

The boy still looked taken aback, but managed to nod his head. Valdese smiled at him as warmly as he could, but since he hadn’t smiled in such a long time he didn’t know if it looked more like a horrified grimace.

‘Your father was a great man.’ 

If Will had looked taken aback before, now he looked like he was being engulfed by a swirl of confusion.

‘You knew my father?’ Will asked.

‘Yes, very well in fact,’ Valdese replied, as at their feet their daemons awkwardly made an act of courtesy (Kirjava bowed and Evin tried to touch noses because she knew what the usual act of courtesy was, but Kirjava didn’t).

‘Will! Come! You need to see this!’ Mary’s voice was extremely loud and Will remembered Zakariya’s information. There hadn’t just been two guards. She had mentioned about seven. 

Three more stormed out of the last room on the right, their hound daemons rearing up on their hind legs, ready to pounce. 

But, like the other ones, they met the bloody and unfortunate fate on the wrong side of a bullet to the head from the Russian. 

Will strided away from him and to where Mary’s voice had come from. It was an early door on the left, with no working lights, and hundreds of pieces of paper thrown carelessly on the floor, with scribbles and what looked like algorithms and calculations on them. 

Mary stood pouring over what looked like a mix between a laptop and a television screen, a notebook in her hand. There was an aerial on the top of it which Mary kept trying to pull out, and she kept glancing over to their right, where Will could just make out smashed glass and a machine which looked like the one on the desk. 

‘Will, can you bring that computer up onto the desk?’ Mary asked, her eyes still glued to the machine in front of her. 

Will obeyed, kneeling down to pull it up. Kirjava helped out by telling him exactly where it was; the darkness had consumed everything in the room and Will couldn’t make out where all of it was. 

The glass was shattered, and the keyboard which had been attached had been ripped off and ripped apart. Will placed it onto the desk where Mary had put something which looked like a brain reader on her head before inspecting what looked like every aspect of the machine which Will had moved before making adjustments to the one in front of her. 

Will shuddered as there were more shots fired outside of the room, and Will saw a dark red liquid fly into the room.

Then, with a bright light which illuminated the room, the one in front of Mary lit up and turned on. Will looked wide-eyed as she typed some words into the keyboard and more words appeared on the screen. 

Then they stopped, because Mary had taken the headset-like thing off and was looking joyously at Will.

‘It’s working! The Cave! Will, we can communicate with it again!’ she shouted triumphantly as Valdese entered the room, his hands and clothes were covered in blood and Will noticed that he could separate from his daemon, who was not in the room with them. 

Mary saw him and looked questioningly at Will.

‘He’s with us. I’m still not sure how, but he knew my father,’ he explained. 

Now, with the room lighted, Will’s stomach lurched as he saw how much blood had really been shed. He hated death, he hated blood, but he knew that sometimes it had to be done. 

Millions of questions were forming in Will’s head about the man who had just saved their lives, and who had claimed that he knew his father well, but he knew they would have to wait as Mary gestured for him to come over again, and look at what words appeared on the screen. 

Mary closed her eyes and appeared to be going into the trance which he had seen Lyra do so many times before.

Will looked intently at the screen, which was blank, but all of a sudden, words came up in a flash, and Will only just managed to follow.

_Is the Cave really working again?_

_Yes._

_Was it right for us to get it back?_

_Yes._

_Do we need to fear the Magisterium?_

_Not necessarily; it depends on the choices you take._

Mary took the headset off and passed it expectantly to Will. at first he wasn’t sure what to do, but after putting it on he found the calm state of mind he used with the subtle knife and when trying to see Zakariya.

_Have the Magisterium found a way of travelling between worlds?_

_Yes._

_Is Lyra okay?_

_Yes._

_Is she in any trouble?_

_Yes._

Will’s heart stopped. He took the headset. Mary had also seen what he had asked and the reply. 

‘Try some other topics- it might be a bit dodgy after so much time,’ she said.

_Are the Magisterium in our world?_

_Yes._

_How are they travelling between worlds?_

_The Russian._

Once again, Will took the headset off in surprise, worry and confusion. He looked behind him at the man who stood there, his jaguar daemon curled up, entwined with his legs as she stroked her. 

Will walked over to him and tried to organise his thoughts, questions and assumptions.

‘Can you… Can you travel between worlds?’ Will asked.

The Russian gave a sly smile and nodded. He stood up and looked like he was going to say something, but he closed his mouth again. 

‘We need to get home, Will,’ Mary was talking to him. 

‘Wait, Mary’, Will told her and turned to the Russian, ‘So can you travel between worlds on your own, at command?’ 

Once again, he smiled and nodded. 

Mary was already at the door with the Cave in her hand, and Will followed her, gesturing for the Russian to come with them. 

He had spent his childhood wanting to know and meet his father, and as soon as he had, he had been killed by a witch. He wanted, needed to know more about that man.

The Russian followed them with his daemon over the piles of bodies, some dead with bullets in their chests and bloodstains across their clothes, and some lying unconscious. 

If the strange and suspicious glances Will and Mary had been shot before were bad, now everyone who walked past looked like they were going to faint. 

A man, a boy, a woman, a cat, a jaguar and an invisible alpine chough taking a leisurely walk home in the streets of Oxford at midnight.


	10. Reunion

When Lyra came back from her walk to Pan packing up all her valuables in a suitcase which she had laid on the bed not expecting much, she was surprised. She was angry, but she couldn’t bear another argument. 

She had already had her soul ripped away from her once, she couldn’t have it done again. 

He had explained everything which Josephine and Jairus had told him, from the fact that they were willing to go with them wherever they went, to their relation to poor Tony Makarios. 

Lyra sat and listened patiently, but Pan feared that her response wouldn’t have changed one bit since earlier. 

As he finished, Lyra didn’t say anything instantly, clearly thinking about something, probably what she should say. 

‘Fine. If Josephine is willing to go with us, then we can go. But we can’t go instantly, we’ll leave next week,’ Lyra told her daemon.

To Pan, he was happy that Lyra had changed her answer and that she was willing to go, but leaving it another week after all the time they had already spared in arguing, was ridiculous.

‘Lyra! That’s the whole point of leaving Oxford! Dr Polstead told us adamantly! The Magisterium are after us again! In a week they’ll most definitely be here! In fact, I’m surprised they aren’t knocking on our door at this very moment!’ Pan argued.

‘I thought you’d be happy that I’d changed my answer! Listen to yourself! You sound like you think you know best!’

‘Well I think I do!’ Pan shouted, jumping up indignantly onto the cupboard.

‘You can’t! Like it or not, we’re the same person! We know the exact same things!’ Lyra told him. 

‘Why are we arguing, Lyra? What’s happening to us?’ 

Lyra didn’t say anything, she just turned away from her daemon, ashamed, and sat cross-legged on the bed, tears streaming down her face.

Pan leapt down from his perching place on the cupboard onto the bed, then curled up onto Lyra’s lap. She gently caressed his fur, her tears dripping onto his red, wood-like coat. 

‘Just one last time, Pan. We’ll leave tomorrow, but for one last time can we relive our entire childhood.’ 

Pan knew what she meant. Oxford was their home. Nothing would ever change that. It had accommodated and kept them safe for eleven years. They had jumped joyously from Jordan roof to roof, they would run wildly and carefree through the grounds and into the cellars with Roger. They would pick fights on the brick-burners and throw balls of mud at them. 

But ever since she had met Mrs Coulter, her life had changed in a way which she thought it never would have. It had swerved unexpectedly several times, sometimes for the better but quite a lot of the times for the worst. 

She hadn’t been the same person after her journey to the North. She never would be the same person. And the only thing which had remained the same when she eventually came home was Oxford, and now that she had to leave she wanted to remember and reflect over all the good times she had had in her childhood. Otherwise it would just be buried even deeper into her memory, never to be uncovered again. 

It was so important to both of them that they could have one last time doing what they had done almost all of their childhood. Also, they hadn’t shown Josephine and Jairus their favourite route across the rooftops, through the kitchen and into the cellar, the last route she had taken with Roger.

* * *

Oliver Payne entered the room nervously, the two other men in the room staring intimidatingly at him. 

Father Montgomery and Father Jian were the other two men sitting at the table, and had been waiting for Payne’s arrival for several hours. They didn’t like to be left waiting.

They had also been expecting another man to be with him who wasn’t. 

‘Where is Gramovski?’ Jian asked, his eyes staring ferociously into Payne’s. 

There was an evident bruise on Payne’s cheek, and his left eye was tinged purple. 

‘They boy, the knife boy, he was at the laboratory. With the woman who can read the Cave. I believe they live together. The boy told Gramovski his name and it had some effect on him. And he turned against us; he killed all of the guards. I don’t know how or why, but the man is with the boy,’ Oliver Payne explained.

Jian and Montgomery, although he didn’t show it, were both extremely frustrated. They had been so close to controlling that world and countless others, and now they were in a terrible situation. They had lost their primary weapon.

‘What was the boy’s name?’ Montgomery asked, his voice as calm as he could make it.

‘Will Parry.’

The other two men exchanged looks. 

‘So our assumptions were correct, and that explains why the man had a connection to the boy. The boy is the son of Stanislaus Grumman, since we’ve figured out his real name is John Parry,’ Montgomery concluded.

‘But… with the man with him, they could be in this world, or any other world. We need to find them, and the fact that they could be in any other world makes it infinitely harder,’ Payne said, his voice wavering. 

‘But we do know where Oakley Street are, and they aren’t going to any other worlds any time soon. And I think I might know where the boy will be going first if he is going to other worlds,’ Father Montgomery told them.

Father Jian looked at him questioningly, but Oliver Payne looked like he knew what Montgomery was going to say.

‘Payne, we will send you with some of our soldiers to High Brazil- where the alethiometer has told us Oakley Street are heading, and Father Jian, can you get us a ticket for the next zeppelin to Oxford.’

* * *

Will pondered over what he had learned that day. If the Cave had been right about the Russian who claimed to know his father, surely he could get to Lyra?

He thought about all the reasons he couldn’t be with Lyra originally- the Spectres, the Dust leaking- and he couldn’t find any which applied to his current situation. 

Kirjava was thinking exactly the same thing, and she bounded up from their bed in time with her human. 

Will strided powerfully, his mind rushing with the possibilities and the fact that he might actually be able to see Lyra again. 

As he walked, he checked his watch to see to his disappointment that Mary and the Russian wouldn’t be up. The time was half-three in the morning.

But he had waited three years for this. 

With a sudden desperate lurch of his stomach, he realised that he didn’t even know if she was alive. She might’ve found somebody else. She might’ve been content enough without him. 

But nevertheless he knocked as loud as he could on Mary’s door, and heard her get out of bed with a rustle of the covers, and he saw her tired face and her half-closed eyes staring blankly at him.

‘Mary, you saw the Cave’s answer earlier, didn’t you? About the Russian?’ 

‘Go to sleep, Will. It’s half past three. But yes, I did see the Cave’s answer about the Russian.’

‘Well, if it’s right, then…’ 

‘No way. You can’t just abandon your mother like that. That’s not what Will Parry would do. I know you want her so bad, but if your mother gets out of hospital and realises that you’ve gone off again, think of what will happen,’ she reasoned.

In his rush to get to Lyra, Will had forgotten all about his mother. Now he practically had to choose between his mother and Lyra. 

If he chose Lyra, then he didn’t know if he could ever even get back to his world, and would consequently die with the knowledge he had betrayed his mother but if he chose his mother then all of it would be for nothing. 

All the midsummer’s days at the bench. All the silent prayers he had begged that he would see her again. The fight in the laboratory. Nearly all that he had done in the past three years of his life. 

‘I don’t want her, Mary. I need her. Kirjava needs him as well. I’ll be back as soon as I can, but where is the Russian?’

‘I know you need her, so I’ll look after your mother as well as I can until you get back, because I did promise Lyra that I would be the best possible friend to you. I don’t know where the Russian is, but I presume he’s in the Gardens somewhere,’ Mary told Will.

He thanked her greatly, before changing quickly and scruffily and heading out of the door, straight towards the Botanical Gardens.

The Russian was quite easy to find; not many people were sitting casually in four in the morning stroking a jaguar sitting next to you.

But the man looked up and smiled warmly at Will, who sat next to him on the tree trunk he was sat at.

‘Is it true what the Cave told us about you? That you can travel between worlds?’ Will asked.

The Russian nodded.

‘I don’t know how, I don’t know why I can and no one else can, but it might have something to do with my time with your father,’ he explained.

‘Were you on the expedition with my father which went into another world?’ Will questioned impatiently.

Once again the man nodded, before telling Will that he could sense his tension, and asked him why he was so anxious, and then what seemed like the longest conversation Will had ever been in followed, but the Russian, who had said his name was Valdese Gramovski, understood.

Eventually he stood up and Will saw his face go into the familiar trance which he used to see Mary’s daemon, which he used with the subtle knife, which Lyra used with the alethiometer.

His daemon was weaved between his legs as Kirjava leapt back up onto Will’s lap, watching every detail of what was happening.

Then the window opened. 

Will saw exactly the same thing happen as with the subtle knife. The window had opened as a small crack in the air, then enlarged until it was big enough for humans to comfortably fit through.

Then he saw glimpses of the different world he saw before him; trees towering above them, the moonlight shining down on them and in the distance a building which looked like an Oxford college. 

Will couldn’t help but smile as he saw everything as Lyra had described it to him on numerous occasions. It was a familiar yet unfamiliar place.

He stepped through the window shortly after Valdese and his daemon and stared in awe at how different and similar this Oxford was to his own. 

Then the window behind him shut suddenly, and Kirjava was at his side, and they were running forward, desperate to find Lyra. 

They came out of the Botanical Gardens and it was then that the pure majesty and beauty of the building which stood before him. He remembered all of Lyra’s stories of her adventures, leaping from roof to roof, the self-proclaimed Queen of the Urchins.

It was every bit as stunning as she had said and he could understand why she treasured it so much and considered it as her only home she would ever have.

The building itself was as grand as it could be, but every single detail boasted wealth and pride. There were many different chimneys which rose above the main building. Spikes spiralled upwards from the roof and there were circular windows on the top floor which looked like something stolen from a church or chapel. Shadows danced upon the roofs, silhouettes in the moonlight.

Then before he knew it himself, Kirjava bounded forward and leapt up onto a pipe which led onto the roof. Will had no idea what she was doing but he followed her example and tried to find footholds wherever he could, but it reminded him of when he had done it the day prior, and then the sharp pain in his back returned.

But his daemon was already far ahead of him and he wanted her to stay in his eyesight, so he climbed as fast as he could, shoving the previous day’s memories to the back of his mind; if the Cave had been right about Lyra being in trouble than he needed to get to her as soon as possible, and he wasn’t one to take any chances.

His hand found a flat surface which was the roof, and he managed to pull himself up, even with only eight fingers and a gun-wound in his arm, and saw to his dismay that his daemon was now even further ahead, so he ran after her, and realised why Lyra enjoyed it so much.

Then he caught up with Kirjava, who kept bounding forward, and the shadows which Will had seen earlier were now half-visible.

They were both females, and their daemons were both with them. One daemon was a sparrow and was flying by his human’s head and then swooping low to the other girl’s daemon, which was a pine marten.

Will stopped abruptly like he had just been frozen. It was Lyra. She was right in front of his eyes for the first time for three years. She had changed, but was still the same girl who had jumped out of the room in Cittagazze all those years ago.

He wanted to call out her name but couldn’t find his voice. He wanted to run over to her but he couldn’t find his legs. He just wanted to be with her again. In person. He just wanted to feel her presence, but Kirjava had beaten him to it. 

She leapt elegantly towards Pan as Lyra turned around and instantly saw him. Will. _Her_ Will. Like him, she couldn’t find her voice and instead managed to walk ungracefully towards him. He had changed quite a lot, but he was still the Will Parry who had saved her in the cave when she was with her mother, who had killed angels and restored Dust with her when he was twelve. 

‘Will’, was all she could whisper, the word tingling on her lips.

His eyes were deep with intense love, so deep Lyra felt like she could’ve drowned in them. He held his arms open for her, and she happily threw herself into them. 

Her eyes welled with tears, and she felt comforted that Will’s tears were falling onto her hair; they both felt the same. 

His arms felt the same as they had three years ago- safe and protective, but he had undoubtedly changed. His grip was stronger and he was more muscular, and she noticed that the sleeve of his left hand was blood-stained, and he seemed to move uncomfortably. 

Countless thoughts and questions swirled around in her head, but she ignored her mind and her heart took over. She pulled her head out of Will’s loving grip and kissed him as she had done all three years ago in the world of the mulefu. 

He kissed her just as passionately back, and she felt like she could’ve kissed him like that for the rest of her life and she would never get bored of it, but then she remembered that Josephine was there with them. 

She reluctantly left Will’s grip and turned to her. Pan and Kirjava had been lovingly tumbling over each other, but now, like their humans, they parted and faced Josephine and Jairus, who looked curiously and questioningly at them.

But Josephine wasn’t angry- the look of pure love and happiness on both Lyra and Will’s face told her all she needed to know. 

The two lovers walked slowly behind her as they walked across the Jordan rooftops as the moon shone down like a spotlight on the ancient and prestigious building. 

Will and Lyra treasured every moment they had with each other, because they had no idea when or how it could be snatched away from them like it had three years ago.

Will looked down back at the grounds and saw that the window had not been shut, and that Valdese and Evin were still down there, and that he would eventually have to go back down and tell him that he would be staying here for a while longer. 

But he couldn’t now. He couldn’t bear to be separated from Lyra for a second longer. 

Kirjava and Pan ran around them jumping onto each other and Will bent down and with a gentle caressing hand, he stroked the pine marten. No words were needed. To Lyra, this was proof that he hadn’t changed one bit. 

Josephine was now at her study-home again, and after she said goodbye to Lyra, they were alone again. 

* * *

The perfect blue water seemed a little too placid for Malcolm; the ominous clouds and sky and the tide patterns were all showing signs of a storm, and he was worried. 

He may have been a keen and (although being his modest self, didn’t admit it) talented young rower, and he had rowed in extreme circumstances, but this was different. He had never been rowing in the Atlantic Ocean in a dangerous storm with no signs of land on either side. 

Alice was out on the deck with him, while Candace and Bud were in the cabin, planning out the route they would take once they reached High Brazil. However, Malcolm thought of it as ‘if they reached High Brazil’. 

Alice’s presence was comforting, but he couldn't help but think about the worst possible scenarios, like whether he would feel the spangled ring while they were in a thunderstorm, in which case they would almost certainly die or be shipwrecked, because he was the only person on the boat who knew how to sail properly. 

They had been at sea for four days now, and they still couldn't tell where they were, and still hadn’t seen any land where they could possibly stop off to get fuel or supplies. 

‘President Carlos Dias will be meeting us at an island between Texas, the Andean Nations and Hispania Nova. It is called Ilha do Luxo, and from there he will send us on the two day boat trip down to High Brazil, so you won’t need to sail the whole way, Malcolm,’ Candace had come up from the cabin and was addressing him. 

‘But they won’t dare sail any further because beyond that island I’m guessing is the Bermuda triangle?’ Alice asked, to which Candace nodded in response.

Asta felt a drop of water on her coat, then another, and then another. She passed a thought onto Malcolm, but he had already noticed that it had started raining, and that it wouldn’t be soon before the storm started. But it would be better to get a head start on it. 

‘You need to get back to the cabin, and can you get Bud up to help me with the tiller. There’s a storm coming soon,’ Malcolm’s sudden orders surprised Alice and Candace, but they obeyed nevertheless.

With each passing second, the rain soaked them more thoroughly, and the storm came closer. 

Then came a distant rumble and the first wave came. The wind blew unforgivingly past, knocking the boom across Malcolm, who ducked just in time. 

Bud came up now, and seeing the problems, he headed to the back of the boat and manned the tiller, trying to go with the waves, rather than against them.

Another wave crashed down onto them and more thunder, closer this time. 

But Malcolm found that the wind was more of an issue, and saw Asta being blown to the other side of the boat, inches away from being tipped overboard. 

Malcolm pulled the sail desperately and the boat changed its course. 

However, it whipped around so violently that now Asta lost her balance and fell helplessly into the foamy and vicious water. 

Malcolm felt a tug in his heart and a sudden overwhelming cold, and ran to the side of the boat, leaving the sail and the boom unmanned. 

Now the boat was just a victim of the storm, and Asta was struggling in her own fight to keep above the surface. With each crashing wave, she was shoved further below the water, and Malcolm couldn’t reach her without being blown overboard just like she had been.

Without anyone at the sail, the boat swerved aggressively to one side, at mercy to the storm. 

Bud tried his best to gain control of the tiller, but it, like the rest of the boat, was being controlled by the sea and the tempest which had overcome it. 

The boat was being tossed between different waves and Asta was being carried further away from Malcolm and the boat. 

Then Malcolm was thrown off the boat by an unhealthy creak of the boat as the lightning struck a massive wave which came crashing down onto the deck. 

The water was freezing, and he was sure if Asta hadn’t been in first he would’ve been paralysed by the shock of the coldness. The water levels were rising and he desperately thrust his arms over the surface, trying to gain some buoyancy and keep above the water. 

Through the splashes and crashes of water on water and wood, he could make out his daemon nearly completely submerged by the water, and he could feel her desperation and pain. 

He threw his hands forward and tried with all his might to swim against the tide and get to his daemon before she was drowned. 

But the current was too strong, although he managed to pass a thought over to his daemon to swim over to him, because the current would be on her side, so she stopped trying to keep above the surface and let the tide take control and carry her to her human. 

Relief crashed down onto Malcolm as another wave did simultaneously as Asta came into his arms. But neither of them knew how they would be able to get back onto the deck, but Bud tossed down a ladder and tied one end onto the side of the boat. 

Malcolm sent up Asta first, because he knew he would last longer in the water, and then he started climbing. More lightning came down, metres away from the boat, Malcolm could see it and the impact it had on the ocean.

But the rain was diminishing and Malcolm saw that the worst of it was behind them. 

The thunder was slowly subsiding and a glint of sunlight touched the sea and the boat. Malcolm had never been so happy to see it in his life. 

But he and Asta knew that in the long term, the worst wasn’t behind them. They weren’t even close to their destination, and the bermuda triangle was still in their way. 

The storm still hadn’t finished completely, but Bud and Malcolm had regained control of the ship. The ocean had seemed to have calmed down, and as Asta tried to shake off the water which had soaked her now-sodden fur, Malcolm walked around the deck, checking for any major damage to the boat. 

If anything was missing or had been destroyed by the storm, they wouldn’t be able to get to High Brazil without going the long way, and then the Magisterium would be able to catch up with them. 

But everything, for the most part, was alright. The sail had been torn a small bit in the corner, and the very front of the boat had been taken off by a bolt of lightning, but other than that they had escaped the storm unscathed. 

* * *

As a nauseous Father Jian and a seemingly unaffected Father Montgomery stood up in their seats, the zeppelin touched solid land. 

There was a rush to get off the zeppelin, and although Father Jian tried to barge through everyone and get out first, Montgomery claimed that they had ample time. 

‘They’re not going anywhere,’ Montgomery reassured him, although his assistant wasn’t sure who ‘they’ was, and he didn’t even know why they had come to their Oxford when the two people they were hunting down could be anywhere, in any world. 

When finally the time came for the two Churchmen to get off the zeppelin and to walk on ground for the first time in days. 

Father Jian followed Montgomery, who seemed to be heading to one of the colleges. Then it all came together for Father Jian. 

Oliver Payne had known that the knife-boy had lived with Mary, and he had travelled with the girl, and that the girl went to a bench once a year, and when he had followed the boy, he had gone to the same bench in his world on the same day. The boy and the girl had been separated when the angels closed all the windows between worlds.

If the boy got the power of travelling between worlds, the first place he would go was to see the girl. Everything entwined with everything else. It all fit together like a jigsaw. 

* * *

For the first time in over three years, Lyra woke up in the same bed as Will. 

She felt his strong arms around her waist, and she had to pinch herself to check she really wasn’t dreaming. 

Pan and Kirjava weren’t in the bed with them , but she could tell that no one else was awake, and she had been woken by someone knocking on the door, although she didn’t know who it could be, because Josephine never got up early, Dame Hannah always sent a letter to her before she knocked for reasons Lyra could never fathom, and the servant who brought her food only ever came when she ordered him to. 

She hastily put some clothes on for some decency, and opened the door. There were two Churchmen standing in front of her. Her heart stopped, and she instinctively shut the door in their faces. 

‘Pan! Pan! For god’s sake, wake up Pan!’ she whispered with her voice raised, but she had no idea where he was. 

She also prayed that he would come out soon, and that the two Churchmen wouldn’t see Will or Kirjava.

She passed a thought to her daemon to wake up, and she felt extremely relieved when he came over to her from the bathroom.

‘What?’ he hissed, annoyed and irritated. 

‘There are two Churchmen at the door, and keep your bloody voice down!’ 

Pan jolted up suddenly, a very different expression on his face.

‘Dr Polstead!’ they both remembered his warning. 

In their reunion with Will, they had forgotten that it was the day that they were supposed to be leaving Oxford, and their zeppelin left in just less than forty-five minutes, as Lyra checked her watch. 

‘Pan, you go and wake Will and Kirjava and tell them to stay in the bedroom, then come back to this room,’ she told him.

She turned back to the door and opened it for the two Churchmen before realising that they would become suspicious that her daemon wasn’t with her. She had become too used to separating from her daemon. 

She was tempted to slam the door in their faces again, but instead just cursed herself and sat down on her kitchen table, remembering the last time two Churchmen came to visit her. They had not had the nicest time in Lyra’s study room. 

‘Lyra Belaqua’, Lyra bit her tongue, ‘we believe that you are not the only one in your home currently,’ the smaller one started.

‘Unless you mean Pan, then I have no idea who you are talking about.’ Lyra told them, remembering the countless times she had successfully lied to adults. How hard could it be now?

As if on cue, Pan came into the room, his fierce eyes piercing into the Churchmen’s daemon’s fearlessly.

‘I think we all know who we mean,’ the taller one said.

Lyra was confused; how did they know about Will? Nevertheless, she carried on lying.

‘Unless you tell me who it is, I might be able to tell you, but I have not got the faintest idea who you are talking about,’ Lyra explained.

Will and Kirjava were watching the conversation intently from a crack in the door in the bedroom. 

They daren’t breathe; any sound could easily give them away, but neither of them liked where the conversation was going. 

‘Well, if there is really no one else in here, you wouldn’t mind us searching in here, would you?’ the small one asked, putting on the most sarcastic and sadistic smile Will had ever seen.

His heart skipped a beat, and he held his fist high, ready to do anything to keep Lyra safe, but she was gesturing something to him. 

Thankfully, the two men had already started searching the kitchen, and didn’t see what Lyra was doing, but Will couldn’t understand. 

She looked like she was miming opening a wardrobe and stepping into it, but when Will thought he had got it, Pan came over as quietly yet quickly as he could.

‘The window,’ he explained. 

Will nodded. Kirjava was already there, and the two men had already finished searching the kitchen. 

‘Hurry!’ Pan whispered. 

But there was no way they could make it in time.

‘You have no authority in my room! I demand impolitely for you to get the hell out!’ Lyra shouted at them, as Will felt a wave of relief over him. The bedroom was connected to the kitchen and living room, so the men could come in any second, but all the doors were closed, and as Will opened the window and he and Kirjava jumped out, Lyra kept stalling them. 

‘Miss Belaqua! We apologise for our rudeness, but we believe that there is someone in your bedroom who has no right to be there, and he has stolen something from us, and we need it back.’

Pan bared his teeth and leapt at the dog daemon. He snarled, clawed and scratched at her. 

They were sure that Will and Kirjava had had enough time to get out of the window, but they couldn’t take any chances. 

But the smaller man reached for the door handle and opened the door. Lyra’s heart stopped for a second as she surveyed the room, but Will wasn’t in there. 

* * *

‘How does Lyra enjoy this?’ Will asked his daemon, clinging onto the roof, his feet hardly kept up on the slim gutter, ‘It’s so bloody dangerous!’ 

Will pulled himself onto the roof as Kirjava jumped up elegantly next to him. They were on the roof which he had first climbed up the day prior, but when he remembered about Valdese, he wasn’t there.

He panicked, and Kirjava knew his worry. He had no proof that the Russian was trustworthy- in his desperation to get to Lyra, he had forgotten about that- and if he wasn’t there he would be stuck in this world forever. But at least he’d have Lyra. 

Kirjava reached the ground a long time before her human, and waited smugly while Will struggled with the footholds and ledges. When he at last reached the ground, they sprinted towards the Botanical Gardens, not stopping once until they saw the faint silhouette of a man and a jaguar sitting on, Will smiled in recognition, his and Lyra’s bench. 

‘Did everything go okay?’ Valdese asked.

‘Yes, except from the Magisterium know that we’re here, you _and_ me. Lyra managed to distract them before they got into the bedroom, so we were able to get out via the window, but we need to leave quickly,’ Will explained. 

Valdese had already stood up when Will mentioned the Magisterium, and was now trying to open a window between worlds. 

‘No!’ Will shouted before he could open it, ‘There’s no way I’m leaving Lyra again!’ 

‘Now that the Magisterium knows we’re here, we need to leave immediately. Remember, we can go anywhere. They’ll never find us, except if we stay in this world. So go and get Lyra, but you have to be quick, otherwise the Magisterium will find you and kill you without hesitation.’

Will nodded, and with all the energy left in his body, and the thought of being reunited properly with Lyra, he leapt from window-ledge to window-ledge, until he got to the one he recognised as Lyra’s. 

He put his ear to the glass, and to his relief, the only voices he could hear was Pan and Lyra’s, so he knocked gently on the glass pane and entered joyously when Lyra opened it for him. 

For a moment, he forgot all about leaving immediately, because of how good it felt to be with Lyra, holding her in his arms, her wonderful scent holding down all his thoughts, but Kirjava and Pan were already at the open window. 

‘Lyra, I couldn’t leave you again, but we have to leave, not just from Oxford, but from your world. It’s the same way I got to be here with you. Just come with me, or else the Magisterium will find us,’ Will quickly told her, trying not to waste any time.

Pan jumped down from the window onto the bed, next to him, and looked up at Will.

‘We made a promise to a friend, and we can’t leave them behind. They said they were willing to come with us wherever we went, although I’m not sure this is what she was expecting, but they will be willing to, don’t worry,’ Pan explained.

Will understood, and nodded for Lyra and Pan to get them, and despite the fact that they were gone for less than two minutes, Will and Kirjava felt like each passing second was an hour, and they couldn’t bear it. They thought about every possible bad scenario, and had never been more relieved when Lyra came back with the girl who had been with them the night before.

Not long after that, they had made their way onto the roof, down the building and into the Botanical Gardens.

‘Will! There’s a man there!’ Lyra whispered at him when she saw him sitting there, his jaguar daemon lying down beside his feet, but Kirjava had already explained to Pan that he was on their side, and that knowledge was soon passed on to Lyra. 

The man held his hand out for Lyra to shake, and she did so hesitantly. But what she was more confused about was when the man got off their bench and went into the trance she had become so familiar with, the one she used for the alethiometer. 

Then the window opened. It instantly reminded her of the subtle knife, and the first time Will had used it. 

The terrain on the other side was very different to her world. It just stretched on endlessly, never-changing. The sun beat down unforgivingly on the thick layer of sand. The desert was desolate, with no wildlife or plants in sight, let alone water. But there was no way the Magisterium would find them. 

Valdese and Evin went in first, gesturing for Will, Lyra and Josephine to follow him to another world. 

* * *

‘Thank you Mary. Do you know when he’ll be back?’ Elaine Parry was clearly getting better, but Mary was afraid that Will’s disappearance would be a setback in her recovery. 

‘Sorry, Elaine, I can’t tell you exactly where he is, but he’ll be back soon, don’t worry,’ she tried to comfort her, but the truth was she had no idea when Will would be back, and she was questioning whether letting Will go with that man was the right decision. 

For all she knew, he could have already been caught by the Magisterium; he could already be dead. 

It was this paranoia that led Mary back to the Cave. If Elaine learnt that Will had gone to another world again, then it would be too much for her. Her current situation was unstable enough, anything else would tip her over the edge. 

So when Mary got home from seeing Elaine, she put her bags down and immediately sat down on the kitchen table and put the Cave headset on. The screen lit up. She channeled all her thoughts into one question, and asked it half-excited and half-reluctant.

_Is the Russian trustworthy?_

_Yes, and he speaks the truth about the boy’s father._

_Did Will get to Lyra?_

_Yes._

_Are they safe?_

_Yes, they are currently in a desolate, barren desert world where water stopped living there over four-thousand years ago._

_Will Elaine be alright?_

_It depends._

Mary snapped out of her trance. The last answer was extremely confusing. Normally when the Cave told her an answer depended, it would tell her what it depended on, but now it just said that it depends. Was it possible that the Cave didn’t know the answer? She carried on asking questions, though, because she needed answers.

_Was letting Will go the right decision?_

_In some ways yes, but in some ways no._

_How was it incorrect?_

_He has no idea what he is doing._

_How was it correct?_

_He is free to do it._

_What must I do?_

_Wait._

_For what?_

But before she could try and get the answer to her question, she retched as the nausea overwhelmed her. The process of asking the Cave questions was physically and mentally draining, and she had known that she had been going on for too long. She reluctantly took the headset off, her mind filled with questions left unanswered. 


	11. The Shadows Speak

Oliver Payne stood on the deck of the Magisterium vessel which had been especially built for speed and surviving unforgiving storms. The two factors which they needed to catch up with Oakley Street. 

The wind was fair, but not a hindrance, and they had more than enough fuel to get to High Brazil and back to Geneva, so it was just a matter of how fast Oakley Street were going. 

And although he hadn’t told any of the crew on the boat, he needed their chase to be a success, because otherwise he knew there would be consequences. He knew how ruthless the CCD really were. 

Sometimes he got dirty looks from the crew, since he had become used to that world, he had forgotten all about the fact that he was the only one who didn’t have a daemon. But he was completely focused on the mission he had been set. 

On their twelfth day at sea, they had seen their first glimpse of the boat they assumed belonged to Oakley Street. Payne had ordered the crew to stay calm, and to keep their distance from the other boat; their boat was three times the size of the other one, and they still weren’t sure if it really was Oakley Street. 

They had turned off the engines, and set the sail instead, to keep as silent as possible. 

Now, two days later, they had kept their distance with the Oakley Street boat, and were ready to confront it, by any means necessary. They were going to destroy it. 

But Oliver Payne had noticed a slow yet drastic change in the tide, and he worried that he knew the answer to why, but didn’t want to say it out loud. He had known about the bermuda triangle from his world and this world from equally terrifying stories, and knew that in his world, a vessel slightly bigger than theirs had gone missing at the hands of the triangle, so that was what Payne was most worried about. But he knew if he worried too much, it would get in the way of the mission. He couldn’t let that happen. With Valdese Gramovski gone, and the alethiometer telling them more and more about what was going to happen, killing Oakley Street was the only way to prevent what was going to happen from happening. 

* * *

After four days spent non-stop walking, trying to cover up their tracks and constantly looking behind them in case the Magisterium somehow managed to breach the barrier between worlds, Will couldn’t take any more. 

Mary’s words were constantly echoing around his head; an irritant nuisance at the back of his head, never leaving him alone.

‘You can’t just abandon your mother like that. That’s not what Will Parry.’

He couldn’t see any reason why they couldn’t go back to his world- he could live there with Lyra until they would have to go back, and Valdese wouldn’t die of the illness. 

That was another thing he didn’t understand. His father was nearly dead by the time he finally met him, and Valdese seemed completely untouched, when he had been in the world three years longer. Maybe the illness didn’t affect some people. 

So, when they settled down to sleep as the sun came down and the night sky consumed the savannah, Will went to sleep with Lyra again, proposing to her what had been bothering him the whole time they had been together. 

‘I think we should go back to my world. It’s not like the Magisterium can get there, and I can’t abandon my mother like that, and leave her for Mary to look after.’

Lyra fell reluctantly out of his warm embrace and faced him. 

‘Is your mother okay?’ she asked, as Will remembered that they hadn’t discussed anything about his mother since they reunited.

‘While I was gone before, I left her in the care of my old piano teacher, and she had a mental breakdown while I was gone, but we put in a good hospital, and Mary looked after me. She was scheduled to have the green light to come out of hospital yesterday,’ he explained.

Lyra looked genuinely worried and sad, as if it was her mother, and Will felt another wave of love for her.

‘Yeah, we should ask Valdese about going back to your world,’ she told him, as they lay back down together. 

  
  


The next day, as soon as Valdese came and woke Will and Lyra up, Will asked if they could have a quick conversation.

‘Is anything wrong? Are the Magisterium on our tail?’ he asked.

Will shook his head.

‘No. But I have to go back to my own world, to look after my mother. We can all go. You won’t be affected by the illness, and Lyra and I can live together. Even Josephine can live close to us.’

‘There’s just one problem,’ Valdese explained.

Will’s eyes narrowed. His look of hope turned quickly into a frown.

‘There’s a window open from Lyra’s world into our’s,’ he told Will.

Will felt a wave of anger and frustration, but didn’t act upon it. He wasn’t sure how to act. He wasn’t sure what to do. This gave him even more reason to worry about his mother. 

The Magisterium would come for her and Mary, and they had no idea where to stop. 

Will felt more constant waves of anger and frustration, and knew that he needed more answers, and there was only one person in their group who could do that. 

He just hoped that Lyra had remembered to pack her alethiometer.

* * *

Serafina Pekkala sat at the table with twenty-four other witches, each representing a different clan. 

She sat at the head, as she had called the meeting after she had had a visit from a fellow witch clan queen, Tilda Vasara. She had spoken about an organisation called Oakley Street, and the war which was about to engulf their world. Serafina couldn’t help but remember the war which had been started by Lord Asriel, and how many of her witch clan had died and suffered. 

Tilda spoke of the major part which the girl, Lyra Silvertongue and the boy, Will Parry, would have to play in it. This confused Serafina a lot, and she found herself thinking about it a lot. 

‘So what you’re saying is that there is going to be another war. How will it be any different than the last one, in which we lost thousands of witches, and with no positive outcome.’ Alagra Satern made a valid point. 

The safety of the witches was their priority, and they wouldn’t get mixed up with human affairs unless necessary. 

‘No. Last time, there was a positive outcome. Dust was preserved and the Authority was killed. But this time, the prophecy is said to be the end of all sin.’ Tilda was trying to assure the other clan queens that it would be worth sacrificing some witches for a perfect world. It would be worth it for the humans, and, more importantly, for the witches.

But she didn’t have any witches who supported her. They said that the human affairs should be sorted out by humans, and that humans and witches were two different types of people.

The meeting came to a close, and Tilda hadn’t got the support of any other clan queens. But although Serafina hadn’t spoken during the meeting, she had been mixed up in human affairs before, and had even birthed a human boy. But the main reason that she supported Tilda was her deep, underlying love for the girl, Lyra Silvertongue.

With most of the witches flying away, back to their clans, Serafina confronted Tilda.

The meeting had been held in Nova Zembla, where the landscape was a vast variety, from snowy, barren lands like in Svalbard, but in some places there were forests where wildlife thrived. They had held the meeting in a forest which was near Lake Enara, the homeland of Serafina’s clan’s homeland. 

‘I agree with your decision to fight this war with the humans, and I will be willing to fight alongside humans and witches alike for the sake of my clan and the greater good.’ Serafina told the witch. 

‘Thank you, Serafina Pekkala, but we don’t have enough witches to be any worth to the humans,’ Vilda explained.

Serafina knew what she had to do. The witches couldn’t ignore a war in their world, which had consequences that would affect everyone and everything in that world, and in countless others.

She stood up on the chair on the head of the table, the one which she had sat on during the meeting, and looked around. Many witches were still there, some preparing to leave and others waiting for the morning to fly back to their homelands.

She cleared her throat, and addressed her fellow witches.

‘We may have our differences with humans. We may think that we are better than them. We may think that if the humans had a problem, then we shouldn’t get involved. But many of us have fallen in love with humans, and many of us have even birthed human children,’ now she had everyone’s attention,’and despite all of our differences, we all live in this world, and there is one common enemy. The Magisterium. We love the world we live in, and would we, as witches, sit back and refrain from helping as we watch all the good things in the world fade away? The Magisterium have tortured and killed our sisters, and if we don’t stand alongside the humans, then the world where we hunt, where we are born, where we live, will be taken over by the Magisterium. So I don’t care what the other witches do, but I know I will be willing to fight alongside Tilda Vasara and the humans,’ Serafina finished her speech. 

All of the witches who hadn’t already left had heard it, and Serafina just hoped that she had given enough of them a change of heart.

And she had inspired many of them, as a gathering was formed around Tilda, telling her that they were willing to fight alongside her and the humans. Serafina smiled to herself; ever since her and Coram Van Texel’s child had been a victim of an epidemic, she had been desperate to avenge the death of her son, and she felt like helping the humans and trying to help preserve the brilliant world she lived in would help that.

* * *

The trance she was engulfed in gave her the exact answers she needed- but not necessarily the answers she wanted.

She had asked the alethiometer if there really was a window open from Will’s world into her world, to which it said yes, and she also asked where it was, to which it said a road in Will’s world called Linkfield Avenue. 

When she told Will this, he said he remembered that road, and that it was quite near his new apartment which he shared with Mary. 

The next day, after they ate and rested, Valdese opened a window into his world. Will was grateful for the change from the barren, lifeless desert to his world, where he recognised where they were. Valdese marvelled at how much his world had changed in the sixteen years he had been gone, and Lyra and Josephine looked curiously at the differences and similarities between that world and theirs.

* * *

Father Montgomery and Father Jian were aware of the window between their world and the knife boy’s. They were also aware of the fact that the boy’s mother and carer lived near the window, and that consequently the boy, Will Parry, would almost definitely be there. 

They entered the window without noticing and they recognised some of the buildings. The roads were filled with things which drove along quickly, made of metal with lights shining in the dark at the front and the back. But they were patient. They knew that the boy, the man and the girl would know about the window and that knowledge would eventually lead them to the window. So they waited. 

* * *

Elaine’s first night back at the apartment was surprisingly calm, except for when there was a knock on the door, and she was woken up from it. She said that it would be Will, that she knew it would be him. She was adamant. And although Mary knew it wouldn’t be, somehow Elaine was right. Will was standing there with Lyra nervously standing behind him. At the sight of Mary, Lyra threw herself into an embrace with her, and Will did so with his mother.

Mary whispered to Will.

‘Why are you here?’ she asked.

‘We can stay for as long as we want as long as we do something first. Otherwise, everyone in this world will be in danger.’

Mary’s eyes narrowed in suspicion.

‘What do you need to do?’

‘There’s a window still open between this world and Lyra’s, and we need to close it. But the Magisterium know about it, and I fear they will be waiting for us,’ he explained. 

‘I think there’s something you might want.’

With that, Mary went back inside the apartment. 

‘Is this Lyra?’ Elaine asked her son.

Will looked bewildered that she knew that, because he had only told her their story while she was in a coma. Maybe she had been listening!

‘Yes, mum. This is Lyra,’ he confirmed, nervous of the opinion his mother would give.

‘I think she’s great,’ she told him, still holding him tight. 

Mary came back, holding something distinct in shape and dark in colour. Will recognised it instantly. It was the sheath for the subtle knife, where the shards were. 

Will was confused; why was Mary giving it to him? Surely she couldn’t have fixed it?

‘It’s nothing like it used to be, but it will still be useful.’ Mary explained, handing over the sheath to Will. 

With his good hand, he felt from the outside, and to his surprise, he felt one solid knife inside. He pulled it out of the sheath, and he suddenly felt like he was twelve again.

‘How did you fix it?’

‘You can’t travel through worlds with it, but it can still cut through it. I figured that you only need the proper forging for the cutting through worlds, so I managed to fix it like fixing anything else,’ Mary confessed. ‘When I had the amber spyglass out I wasn’t really looking at it, I was getting it out of the bag so I could fix the knife.’ 

Will wanted nothing more than for time to stop right there and then, with the three people who he loved the most in the world. But they had to close the window, otherwise the Magisterium would wage war on his world.

  
  


* * *

The two churchmen continued waiting until finally they saw three children and one adult walking towards them. Father Montgomery and Jian were both equipped with pistols, and were prepared to kill all of them except Gramovski. They had also brought with them four troops, all armed with machine guns, because last time they had confronted the girl and the boy, they had both gotten away. 

Josephine saw something flicker in a bush out of the corner of her eye. She gestured towards where she saw the movement, and they hid behind one of the ancient, towering trees which had lived for centuries in the Oxford Botanical Gardens. Another small movement, and a single crack in the air as something flew narrowly past the Valdese’ ear. While Will and Valdese stayed on the ground because they were armed, Lyra and Josephine started climbing the tree. 

More sharp cracks splintering the silence which surveyed the picturesque gardens, and sudden movements below their vantage point in the tree. 

Josephine saw four men all with machine guns advance onto the left side of the tree, and two more men emerge from the bushes holding pistols, trained on the place beside where Will was standing. 

They were heavily outnumbered, and Josephine felt like she had to do something. Her daemon, Jairus, fluttered down onto a lower branch. The pain for them both was unbearable. She felt a tug on her heart as Jairus flew below the tree’s lowest branch and dug his claws into the eagle daemon which had been perched on the smallest man’s shoulder. 

The two churchmen recognised the difference between a sparrow and a daemon immediately, and while they were temporarily distracted by Jairus, Will came out from behind the tree, the subtle knife in his hand. 

The handle felt familiar in his hand as he drove it into the arm of one of the men. He was determined not to kill anyone, but the man fell to the floor in excruciating pain. The other man was a lot taller and bulkier, and Will charged straight at him, because he had a gun trained on his head. 

With the knife outstretched, he drove it into the chest of the other man, but Father Jian managed to dodge the sharp tip of the knife by stepping quickly and agilely, before slamming a fist into the boy’s torso.

Will fumbled the knife and it fell out of his grip as the man was seconds away from putting a bullet in his head. Will put his good hand on the gun which was pointed at him and pushed it to one side, out of the man’s hand before reaching for the knife and destroying the pistol.

A sharp pain in his shoulder as another punch came in from the man. Will stood back up, the pain coursing through his body. 

Father Jian had met a match when it came to the boy he was fighting. Every punch got blocked, every headlock was penetrated, and every reach for the knife was denied. When he finally knocked the knife out of the Will’s hand, he managed to pick it up and jabbed it into Will’s stomach. 

Will dodged at the last second and got a hand on Father Jian’s thigh, using his strength to flip him over with his thigh. The churchmen fell helplessly to the floor, cracking his head on the floor, and another sharp pain came into his body as Will stabbed him light enough for him not to die, but hard enough for him to pass out, and he did the same for Father Montgomery.

Valdese Gramovski was having more problems with the soldiers. He had managed to dodge all their bullets so far and blend in well with his surroundings, but it wouldn’t be long before they found him again. 

Then, through the cracks in the bushes, he saw Will emerge from the other side of the tree, right into the path of the soldiers. Valdese couldn’t let them kill him just because the Magisterium wanted himself.

Evin pounced before the soldiers could see Will, drawing blood with her ferocious and keen claws from two of the hound daemons which belonged to the soldiers. 

From behind, Will stabbed one of the guards, and unintentionally killed him as the dog rose up into a cloud of Dust. 

Valdese came out of the bush, raising the gun and firing three shots and killing three guards instantly and without hesitation. Will looked horrified at the sight of the blood everywhere, and the man which he had just killed. 

‘How do you do that?’ he asked, still shaking.

‘Do what?’ Valdese responded.

‘Kill someone in cold blood that easily?’

It wasn’t something Valdese had ever really thought about- he had killed people all of his life, especially when he had been a contract killer, and had never considered how he could take a life away without hesitating.

‘I imagine they are the drunk person who was driving the taxi which killed my parents. They went on long trips every now and then, and when on one of these trips their taxi driver drove them off a cliff. Or I imagine they killed someone else I was close with, for example, I didn’t even have to do that for these people and the people at the laboratory. They were responsible for the death of my best and only true friend. Your father.’

Will looked at him questioningly. 

‘If you were born, then why weren’t you allowed to go on the trips with your parents?’ 

‘They always told me that it wasn’t safe for me but when I was older they would take me,’ Valdese answered, ‘but it should be easier for you to kill these people because they killed your father.’

Lyra and Josephine jumped down from their spot in the tree, trying not to look at the now-red grass which was sodden from the blood which looked like it had been spilt from a bottle. 

‘We should go back to my apartment,’ Will told them.

‘Is there enough room for all of us?’ Lyra asked.

‘We could make room, and we still have money from selling our old house, so worst comes to worst we can buy another apartment,’ Will suggested.

The two girls started to make their way back to the apartment- they couldn’t stand the blood which covered the ground, and Will couldn’t blame them, he was finding it traumatizing enough. 

‘Will, try and kill them. The ones which you stabbed. Remember, they murdered your father. They were the reason you grew up without a dad.’ Valdese handed him his gun, which had blood stained all the way from the handle to the barrel. 

Will walked nervously to the other side of the tree, where the two unconscious bodies lay down on the bloody floor. He closed his eyes, telling himself that he was dreaming, and that he hadn’t just killed a man and nearly killed two others. But whenever he opened his eyes, the same sight greeted him; the blood reaching out and touching everything in sight, the bodies lying helplessly on the floor, the knife holes in their arms, and the gun in his hand.

Will felt his heart pound quicker and quicker by the second. His hand trembled on the trigger. He felt every part of his body shake as behind him Valdese shut the window, then watched Will in anticipation. Time seemed to stand still. He raised the gun so that it pointed directly at the taller man’s head. 

_These people killed my father. These people deserve to die,_ he kept telling himself. But they were human. They had a life. They were just like him. He had hardly known his father, and they hadn’t directly killed his father, the witch had. 

Will felt like his arm was frozen, and he felt the same with his finger on the trigger. Everything around him seemed to stand still, waiting for him to do something.

Then he took his finger off the trigger and dropped the gun. He couldn’t kill a human at will. He told Valdese not to kill them either; enough people had died in that place at that time. 

* * *

Fifteen days at sea had its effect on the High Brasil-bound half of Oakley Street. There had been multiple times where they had had to let the nausea overcome them as they threw up out of the cabin windows, and Malcolm felt so worn out that he fell asleep at the sail on their thirteenth day at sea. This incident nearly turned the ship completely the other way around. 

They had had multiple sightings of land now, but their compass and their map told them that they still had another two-hundred and fifty miles until they reached the island they were set to meet President Carlos Dias. Malcolm also knew that in that three hundred miles lay the bermuda triangle. 

The signs of a storm had already shown themselves, and the compass which was strapped to the mast with a nylon cord had begun to completely malfunction, the thin needle swerving unpredictably from left to right and visa versa. 

They had also seen a bigger, much bigger vessel which seemed to be cautiously surveying their boat, and it had been following them for many days now. Although no one said it, everyone knew exactly what the boat was and what it was doing there. 

‘Do you think it will be worth it?’ Malcolm asked his daemon, Asta, who was curled up next to him as she cleaned her coat.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Everything we're doing- travelling to High Brasil, surviving storms, sailing through the Bermuda Triangle, when this is all over, if we win, will it all be worth it?’ 

‘Maybe. Tilda and Amos didn’t really tell us much about the prophecy, did they?’ Asta said.

‘No, maybe for good reason.’

Alice came up onto the deck shortly followed by Bud and Candace, with their daemons. 

‘We’re nearing the Bermuda Triangle. The compass directions have been sent completely crazy, from the cabin we can see the change of water, and at the speed we’re going, we should have been there an hour ago, but there was the time we had to stop for a while on that island to repair the boat, so we’re approaching it right now.’ Candace informed them. 

‘Bud, I need you to keep hold of the tiller, and keep it completely straight. Unless we turn the boat around by accident. Candace, you need to give me directions and advice, and Alice needs to keep an eye on the Magisterium vessel.’ Malcolm told them. 

It was the first time anyone had verbally addressed the ominous threat which was looming over them, and not just the Bermuda Triangle. 

The rest of the group nodded, getting ready for whatever the Triangle had to offer. And the Magisterium.

Malcolm stayed on the deck as Asta went down to check for any leaks in the hull and get all of the Oakley Street members their pistols, in case the Magisterium were planning an attack. 

The rain had started a long time ago, and was now hammering down onto the deck, dripping off the sodden mast and getting into the cabin, so Malcolm went and shut the horizontal door which led down to the cabins as soon as his daemon had re-emerged from the hull. 

Malcolm felt once again the coldness of the pistol against his skin, and felt shivers down his spine as he remembered the capability of what he was holding, and its purpose. Nevertheless, he checked for ammo, and gave out the other guns to his friends, and as the rain soaked them and the boat more thoroughly and more thoroughly, they heard the first crack of lightning. It was behind them, but still dangerously close to their boat. 

Then almost at the exact same time as the first crack of lightning came crashing down into the water, the first gunshots splintered the air. 

Hundreds of cracks filled the air, as their boat was tossed helplessly up in the air again and again. They had already faced storms on their boat trip, but Malcolm and Asta could both already tell that this was different. As well as the mast giving unhealthy creaks and groans, the very hull and outside of the boat was giving way against the sheer power of the tempest which was destroying the boat. 

Malcolm let the boom fly to the other side of the boat, swerving the boat so it went with the tide, but soon realised that it was the opposite way to High Brasil, and in front of them was the Magisterium vessel, which would destroy the boat and kill all of them instantly. 

‘Bud! Pull the tiller to the right!’ He shouted, straining his lungs and throat as he tried to get his voice over the noise of the storm. 

Bud shot a glance over to him, nodding. 

The boat violently tipped over to one side, and everyone on it was thrown carelessly to the other side of the boat. 

Candace was affected the worst; she had already been standing on that side of the boat, and consequently was hurled completely off the boat. Her magpie daemon beat his wings, trying his best to defy the wind as it slashed past them. Candace’s footing slipped on the edge of the soaked deck, and she fell off the boat. She flung her arms forward, feeling for something, anything which she could hold onto. Her fingers found the edge of the boat, and she clung onto it with all her strength. Her daemon was tugged with her, and she felt like her grip was diminishing. It could slip any second. She cleared her head and braced herself for the coldness of the ocean. 

But something hit her before the extremity of the coldness. She felt it instantly as it settled into her body, bringing unbearable pain with it. 

She felt her hand slip away from the boat, and something strong and warm grab onto her hand. She felt like she could pass out any time about then. Her body, nearly fully unconscious, slammed against the boat as Alice pulled her up. The bullet wound in her hip drew blood, which dripped down into the water. 

A shape under the water became apparent to Alice. She pulled just a bit harder on Candace, knowing fully well that blood attracted sharks, and who knows what else? 

The shape was coming closer by the second, and as Alice managed to pull Candace up onto the deck, the shape leapt up, its jaws slamming shut on thin air. 

Alice was half-right in assuming that it was a shark. It looked exactly the same like the pictures, drawing and descriptions Alice had heard and seen, but it was much, much bigger. It was bigger than their boat. 

‘What the fuck is that?’ Bud cried, as he saw the full size of the massive _thing_ which had just jumped out of the water, inches away from killing Candace. 

Gravity forced it back into the water and a huge splash followed. More thunder, but with it came more waves which came crashing down onto the boat, and more gunshots from the Magisterium. Candace had passed out, but Alice checked her heartbeat and, to her immense relief, she wasn’t dead.

Alice ran, dragging Candace behind her, down into the cabin, and laid her down onto one of the beds, the blood drifting from her body onto the sheets. 

Then they felt it. Every person on the boat, everything on the boat felt it. It was like gravity had taken over everything and was pulling them down to the very centre of the earth. 

Malcolm thought that they were getting sucked down into a whirlpool. From the cabin, next to the bleeding and unconscious Candace, Alice could see that there was no whirlpool, and that nothing looked remotely weird about the water which they were crossing over. 

But the sharks were still there; they must have been used to whatever was happening to their boat.

Then came the first crack, and the first leak. Alice heard it before anyone else. Ben gave a small whimper as they both immediately recognised that sound as the hull of the boat breaking. 

Back on deck, the sharks were circling the boat, preparing to attack the already damaged boat. Malcolm was confused; sharks never hunted in packs, or shoals, but these ones were working together and communicating. 

He pulled in the sail, hoping that the wind was strong enough to carry them against the tide, but gentle enough not to completely capsize them. 

He felt more downwards tugs on the boat, as Asta let out a yelp.

‘The sharks. They’re not preparing to attack. They’re waiting. The pull… whatever it is, is going to completely pull us down soon, and they’ll be waiting to feed on us.’

That made a lot more sense to Malcolm; the sharks weren't actually working together, and were just waiting for their free food. But it didn’t comfort him one bit.

Alice looked at the atlas which was pinned up on the cabin wall. She traced her finger from Brytain all the way to where she was sure they were. There were islands on either side of them, which was odd, but then she saw the cause of the tugging. Next to them was the Caribbean sea, which only just merged with the Atlantic, which they had been sailing on ever since they had left Brytain. Two tides were coming together. It must have resulted in a fault in the earth’s magnetic field. But every way Alice looked at it, they didn’t stand a chance.

The Magisterium vessel coped a lot better with the storm than the puny, fragile boat which Oakley Street were sailing. The machine guns which were positioned at the front of the deck shot down the sharks which unfortunately strayed too close to the ship. They were, under the command of Oliver Payne, gaining on the Oakley Street boat, and were going as fast as their current fuel supply would let them. But they had everything under control. It was like a game of chess where Oakley Street had lost its Queen, Rooks, Knights and Bishops, and the Magisterium hadn’t broken a sweat. 

But like a pawn getting to the end of the opposition’s side of the board, everything could change in the blink of an eye. 

Malcolm took one last look at his daemon as the deck was now the only part of the boat which was still above the surface. Then the boat was gone, Malcolm threw his hands back over the surface, trying to pull himself out of the water, and Asta did the same. He saw Bud come out of the water, but Alice and Candace were nowhere to be seen. Then Asta remembered, they’d gone back down to the cabin when Candace had been shot.

Malcolm instinctively took a breath and dived down under the water and swam until he saw the boat. But now he was swimming with the tugs, and he was worried that he would get pulled down to the sea bed. He reached the deck once more. He smashed the door and swam into the second floor, seeing the water turn all red. That meant Candace was there. And so was Alice. Candace was unconscious, and Alice was trying to pull her up, but she was running out of breath. Malcolm gestured for her and Ben to get to the surface, and for him to take over with Candace.

He took hold of her hips, and immediately felt her bullet hole. Malcolm ripped off some of the bed sheet and tied it from him to Candace, then swam as hard as he could. 

But swimming against the magnetic-like pull with the weight of a human and her daemon was impossible, and he realised that too late. He couldn’t save everyone. He desperately swam upwards, his arms thrusting forwards in a syncopated rhythm. He was still many metres from the surface, and he was nearly completely out of breath. He didn’t even know if Candace was still alive. The blood was still pouring freely out of her wound. The sharks. 

They now circled around him, waiting for him to run out of breath. Then one lunged in, baring its teeth and it grabbed hold of Candace’s magpie daemon, which jolted Candace back to life. Then the shark died. Another one took a huge bite into Malcolm’s leg, but he managed to remove his limb from the shark’s mouth by firing two shots into its eye. Malcolm wasn’t sure how the first one had died, because his vision was now blurred, and he knew he wouldn’t make it. He untied the bed sheet which held him and Candace together, but he could see something sharp jutting out of the shark’s body. Then the rest of the sharks also met the same fate. Malcolm gave up hope. He stopped moving and let himself drift off. The last thing he saw was many things fly down into the water, causing a lot of splash and foam in the water. 

The next time Malcolm woke up, he was on a beach. His vision was still blurred, but he could see the sun shining down on him. He tried to sit up, but felt a sharp and relentless pain in his right leg. Then everything slowly came back to him. The storm. The Magisterium. The sharks. 

He could hear female voices and one male one. He recognised some of them. He felt with one hand for anything to make sure he was still alive. Then he felt a soft but sodden coat, and he knew it instantly to be Asta’s. His vision slowly became clearer. There were many people on the beach, and he was on a white stretcher, with a bandage on his leg. Asta was curled up next to him, still sleeping. Then slowly but surely, he recognised the figures one by one. 

He saw Bud and Alice, and Candace sprawled out on a stretcher similar to the one he was on. She had a bandage also like his, but it looked a lot worse, and there were many more female figures crowded around her. They were sleek and beautiful, and Malcolm saw that some of them didn’t have daemons. They were witches!

Malcolm saw Tilda Vasara standing next to him, peering under his bandage, lifting it up gently with one hand. She put something on his wound, which soothed it but stung at the same time. 

Seeing him awake, Tilda embraced him and asked how he was feeling.

‘I’m not sure, I think I’m fine, but then again I haven’t even seen my wound yet, so that might change my mind.’

Tilda steadily lifted up the bandage again, and Malcolm looked nervously at his wound, but quickly looked away. The blood loss explained why he felt so dizzy, and whatever spell the witches had put on it must’ve had limited the pain as much as possible. But the wound itself looked horrible. The blood was everywhere, and there were many marks in his skin where the shark’s teeth had entered his flesh. 

‘You won’t be able to walk again for another few months without a stick or something, but you can certainly not sail anymore.’ Tilda informed him.

Alice ran over to him when she saw that he had woken up. She went straight up to him and pulled him into a tight embrace. Malcolm tried his best to hug her back, but it hurt too much, so he lay back down. 

‘You deserve a bloody medal of honour for that. You didn’t just save my life, you saved Candace’s while avoiding being eaten by bloody twenty feet sharks!’ 

Malcolm smiled at her, as another witch came over to him, embracing Tilda first before turning to him, holding out her hand for him to shake it, which he did.

‘I believe we haven’t met, but I’m a close friend of Lyra’s and of Tilda’s. My name is Serafina Pekkala.’

‘Thank you for saving _my_ life there. I’m Malcolm Polstead.’

‘The Magisterium vessel was disposed of, and no one on it survived. They know that we’re here, though. President Dias will be here this evening, and the meeting will be held, which we will attend with you. If you need confirmation, we _are_ on your side.’

Malcolm was about to ask what that meant, but then he remembered what Tilda had told him all those weeks ago.

‘It’s started, hasn’t it?’ he turned to face her.

She nodded.

‘Yes, but this is only the beginning. There is still a lot of fighting to be done. That is why we need an army. And that is why we are here.’

* * *

Will and Lyra were sleeping together in the guest room when Mary went into the living room again, unable to sleep. Ever since the Cave had told her to wait, and Will and Lyra had come back, Mary had tried to gain more answers from the Cave, but there must have been some faulty wiring or a break in the algorithm because it wasn’t working anymore.

So on Will’s first night back at their apartment, Mary turned her mind way back to the first time she had spoken to the Cave, four years ago. She remembered when a confused girl had wandered into her laboratory, claiming she was from another world. 

She put the headset on, and thought about everything she wanted to know. From if Elaine would be all right, to whether Lyra could stay there forever, and not be bothered by the Magisterium ever again. From if she should let Will and Lyra sleep together to whether everything would be all right in the end, she powered all of that confusion, all of that thought into her mind.

_You need to go. Now._

Mary jumped in the seat, surprised yet excited that the Cave was working again. She tried to remain calm, and she put the headset on again and asked some questions.

 _Where do I need to go?_

_Somewhere outside of this world._

_Why?_

_If you don’t fight in this war, then you are definitely going to lose. It is simple._

_But-_

_You don’t have much time at all._

_What is this war?_

_The Magisterium are desperate to get back the man, Valdese Gramovski, and once they get him back, they will use him to wage war on all the other worlds, and conquer them._

_Why do they need the man?_

_Because he is a sort of beacon. A Dust Beacon._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the final chapter in this one, but the next part will be out soon. In case you miss it, the name of it will be: A Window Between Time.


End file.
